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.

“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

• Acknowledgments    Introduction by Ted Kooser    New PoemsI. American RiverArabesques 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 HauntsThe 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 PoemsI. The Sacred Cows of Los AngelesThe 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 FaultLiving 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 PicnicThe 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-CanalLandscape 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 ParkNear 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 BeachReport from the Past    The Story    Excavating the Ruins of Miami Beach    The Meeting