Random House
November 2012
On Sale: November 20, 2012
176 pages ISBN: 0812993683 EAN: 9780812993684 Kindle: B008QLSS4K Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
In his latest laugh-out-loud book of political verse, Calvin
Trillin provides a riotous depiction of the 2012
presidential election campaign.
Dogfight is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other
poems and occasionally by what the author calls a pause for
prose (“Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has
Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious
Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough”).
With the same barbed wit he displayed in the bestsellers
Deciding the Next Decider, Obliviously On He Sails, and A
Heckuva Job, America’s deadline poet trains his sights on
the Tea Party (“These folks were quick to vocally
condemn/All handouts but the ones that went to them”) and
the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican
nomination (“Though first-tier candidates were mostly
out,/Republicans were asking, “What about/The second tier or
what about the third?/Has nothing from those other tiers
been heard?”). There is an ode to Michele Bachmann, sung to
the tune of a Beatles classic (“Michele, our belle/Thinks
that gays will all be sent to hell”) and passages on the
exit of candidates like Herman Cain (“Although his patter in
debates could tickle,/Cain’s pool of knowledge seemed less
pool than trickle”) and Rick Santorum (“The race will miss
the purity/That you alone endow./We’ll never find another
man/Who’s holier than thou.”)
On its way to the November 6 finale, Trillin’s narrative
takes us through such highlights as the January caucuses in
frigid Iowa (“To listen to long speeches is your duty,/And
getting there could freeze off your patootie”), the
Republican convention (“It seemed like Clint, his chair, and
their vignette/Had wandered in from some adjoining set”),
and Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded “47 percent” speech,
which inspired the “I Got the Mitt Thinks I’m a Moocher, a
Taker not a Maker, Blues.”
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