Regular Haunts

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Regular Haunts

New and Previous Poems

Gerald Costanzo
Introduction by Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry Series

156 pages

Paperback

March 2018

978-1-4962-0586-5

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2018

978-1-4962-0655-8

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2018

978-1-4962-0657-2

$19.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.

Author Bio

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.

Praise

Previous 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 Contents

Acknowledgments    
Introduction by Ted Kooser    
New Poems
I. American River
Arabesques 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 Haunts
The 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 Angeles
The 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 Fault
Living 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 Picnic
The 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-Canal
Landscape 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 Park
Near 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 Beach
Report from the Past    
The Story    
Excavating the Ruins of Miami Beach    
The Meeting    

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