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.

“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 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.