Regular Haunts

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.