This beautifully and masterfully written collection of poetry celebrates the queer and marginalized experience. He presents a wide array of voices, tones, and humanity. This is a collection that I know I will come back to again and again. ( )

No, this is not a self-help book but you might find it as I did drawn to the wit and wisdom of Jannise's poetry. For example in the title poem he urges us to "Run people over in conversation. Let them finish not one sentence. Let them sit with with their own nonsense."

Jannise is at his best when he is making astute and playful ideas. It is a work of poetry that varies in scope, themes and ways of viewing the world. ( )

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through Library Thing's Early Reviewers program.)

So I tell them the story.
Vintage thrift store, mid-July.
I take two jackets to the dressing room,
similar in style
but one is clearly made of heavier substance,
and noticing a $30 difference,
I switch the price tags.
The girl at the counter actually says, What a steal.

Now, if you're expecting my parents
to groan with disapproval,
or to make some appeal
to the eight commandment,
then I should tell you that all their lives
they've been robbed.

("Leather Jacket")

My mother wouldn't let me do much
in the kitchen. I was told to watch the
biscuits. I watched them burn.

("Let Me Eat Cake")

Based on the book's title, I expected HOW TO BE BETTER BY BEING WORSE to center on the poet's growing awareness that sometimes you have to engage in minor social harms as a strategy of self-care: to protect yourself from the sometimes damaging demands of others. Being cruel to be kind - to yourself.

Reader, enter the tragedy of misplaced expectations.

A few of the pieces are adjacent to this idea, but not enough for my liking; although, to be fair, the copy on the book's back cover promises a slightly different theme: "HOW TO BE BETTER BY BEING WORSE freely indulges in harmless wickedness as its speaker grows in self-awareness, slowly learning to let go of inherited shame while continuing to seek self-forgiveness for the harms he has caused the outside world." This hits a bit closer to home, though I didn't always get a measurable, linear sense of growth as we progressed from Part One to Part Four; nor would I call a trail of accidentally dead animals "harmless wickedness." (To wit: there's a Pomeranian left dead in a ditch, the result of a hit and run that the author regards in a weirdly cavalier manner, and a turtle starved to death in the course of a botched house-sitting job.)

Overall I found HOW TO BE BETTER BY BEING WORSE to be a bit of a mixed bag: some poems I enjoyed, others not so much, and a few excerpts just rubbed me the wrong way. (See, again, the needlessly dead animals that seem not to affect the narrator all that much.)

Jannise's poems center on themes of self-pity and -esteem; kind strangers met at Halloween parties; pettiness and jealousy; falling in and out of love; heartbreak, and heartbreaking; Queen biopics and cat cafes; the dos and don'ts of being a mascot; parental relationships; and the singular heartbreak of visiting a family member in prison.

"Flamingo Sexual" - for which Jannise won a 2020 Pinch Literary Award - ranks among my favorites, as does "What I'm Into," "Ways to Do It," and "After Visiting My Brother in Prison." "Passengers, 1938" is at the bottom of my list, and brings to mind a line from "I'm writing well for no one but myself": "And I want to say I get that / but I don't."

Honestly, I think that sums up damn near every book of poetry for me, love it or not. ( )