What Just Happened

In What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency (a Satire), David Starkey memorializes each week of Donald Trump’s four years in office with a single haiku. While the poems sizzle with dismay and disbelief, they are often tempered by dark comedy as Starkey catalogues Trump’s outrages in lines you won’t soon forget.

“Here’s a book of high-speed history for you, friends. It’s easy to forget the Trump years, probably because we want to. But if we are to remember the past so as not to repeat it, David Starkey makes it easy and even pleasant to do so by wrapping each of the president’s gaffes in that most durable of poetical forms, the haiku. “Literature is news that stays news,” says Pound, and Starkey proves his point with poems that are funny, maddening, and razor-sharp.” David Kirby

Author Biography

David Starkey is Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College and Coeditor of Gunpowder Press and The California Review of Books. A former Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, he has published poetry in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review and many others. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s) is in its fourth edition, and his recent poetry collections include A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel, Circus Maximus, Like a Soprano and Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song. You can read more about him at davidstarkey.net.