Regular Haunts

New and Previous Poems

Gerald Costanzo

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781496205865
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496206558
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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. 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 Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo's work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 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
• About Gerald Costanzo
• Other Works by Gerald Costanzo
• Series List