Regular Haunts: New and Previous Poems(Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry)

Gerald 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. Costanzo evokes 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. He mourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be found but where its semblance can be endlessly marketed. Regular Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo’s work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments     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    

About the Author :
Gerald Costanzo is the author of eight collections of poems, including Badlands, In the Aviary, Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard, and Great Disguise, and editor of six anthologies of poetry. He is the recipient of the Devins Award for Poetry and two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, and two Pushcart Prizes. A graduate of Harvard University and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and Nehalem, Oregon.

Review :
“There’s that delightful surface, sparkling with wit, with satire, with wordplay, and then there’s always that something else, that mystery maybe a fathom beneath the sun on the waves.”-from the introduction by Ted Kooser   “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