Regular Haunts: New and Previous Poems

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...