Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other poems and occasionally by what Calvin Trillin calls a pause for prose 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 and the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican nomination.
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.”)
A longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin is also The Nation’s deadline poet. His acclaimed books range from the memoir About Alice to Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff.
