Description
Book SynopsisGerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone.His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life.
Costanzoevokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now—in the present—is forced to live with diminished experience. Hemourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be foundbut where its semblance can be endlessly marketed.Regular Hauntsis a retrospective collection of Costanzo’s work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.
Trade ReviewPrevious praise for Gerald Costanzo’s poetry:
“Costanzo is a grief-ridden observer of the
kulchur. He reminds us of what we had, what we lost, perhaps what we never knew— and he does it in a mature, wise, lovely cadence. He is smart yet humble, full of pity for all of us, full of amazement. ‘When I first heard about America,’ he says, ‘it was already too late.’ He is one of our prophets.”—Gerald Stern
“This is truly poetry in the American grain. Costanzo looks unflinchingly at our totems, artifacts, and folkways and sets them down just as they are, with a deadly but affectionate irony.”—Carolyn Kizer
“Costanzo’s wit and satire and vision of the grotesque world of America get to the center of much of the madness of our culture.”—Peter Balakian
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction by Ted Kooser
New Poems
I. American RiverArabesques and Bottle Blondes
Provincetown
American River
Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell
Deathgrass at the Wheeler Summerfest
Tinnitus
Memory and Loss
Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo
The Lives They Lead
Stories
Minnie’s Death II. Regular HauntsThe Big Heat
Blood on the Moon
Stairway to an Empty Room
A Graveyard to Let
Downtown
The Longest Second
The Out Is Death
Blood of Poets
City of Whispering Stone
Judge Me Not
The Gentle Hangman
The Winter People
Invitation to Violence
Deadline at Dawn
Havana Run
Spend Game Previous Poems
I. The Sacred Cows of Los AngelesThe Sacred Cows of Los Angeles
Snake
“What Youngstown Needs Is Good Representation”
Introduction of the Shopping Cart
Houdini Disappearing in Philadelphia
For Four Newsmen Murdered in Saigon
Newlywed
Badlands
The Resurrection of Lake Erie
Dinosaurs of the Hollywood Delta II. Living the Good Life on the San Andreas FaultLiving the Good Life on the San Andreas Fault
The Problems, the Models
The Riot of Nickel Beer Night
Manhattan as a Latin American Capital
In the Aviary
Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard III. At Irony’s PicnicThe Rise of the Sunday School Movement
Braille
Grasshoppers
Flagpole Sitter
Seeing My Name in TV Guide
Hunger
A Tax Auditor for the IRS Dreams
At Irony’s Picnic IV. Bournehurst-on-the-CanalLandscape with Unemployed Jockeys
The Bigamist
Everything You Own
Stargazers
Five Small Songs of America in 2076
Carl Yastrzemski
Vigilantes
The Man Who Invented Las Vegas
When Guy Lombardo Died
In the Blood
Bournehurst-on-the-Canal V. Washington ParkNear Lacombe
Building
My Kindergarten Girlfriend
Pastoral
The Old Neighborhood
Potatoes
Toward San Francisco
Jungles
Washington Park VI. What’s Wrong with the Moon?What’s Wrong with the Moon? VII. Excavating the Ruins of Miami BeachReport from the Past
The Story
Excavating the Ruins of Miami Beach
The Meeting
