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    Regular Haunts
    New and Previous Poems

    Gerald Costanzo (Author), Ted Kooser (Introduction by)

    9781496205865

    Paperback / softback, published 1 March 2018

    156 pages, none
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.236 kg

    “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

    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.

    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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