Focus: Satire — Summer 2024

Focus: Satire

Volume 45, Number 2
Summer 2024

Excerpts available through Project Muse; full articles available to Project Muse subscribers.

From the Editor

The Question of Jargon by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Focus: Satire

Introduction: The Extremes of Satire by Sophia A. McClennen

Kerry Soper reviews #SAD! Doonesbury in the Time of Trump by Garry Trudeau

Daniel Freeman reviews A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Marlon Bundo and Jill Twiss, and: Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse by John Lithgow

Dina Rezk reviews Revolution for Dummies: Laughing through the Arab Spring by Bassem Youssef

Gina Arlene Stinnett reviews Bitch Planet, Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly Sue DeConnick, and: Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch by Kelly Sue DeConnick

José Álvarez Lara reviews Obi’s Nightmare by Chino and Tenso Tenso

Paul Allen Miller reviews Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn’t by Sophia A. McClennen

Lauren Feldman reviews Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States by Dannagal Goldthwaite Young

Matthew R. Meier reviews Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement by James E. Caron

Lost and Found

Faerie Queene Reads Best Fast by Brendan White

Fiction

Barry J. Faulk reviews Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel after David Bowie by Lance Olsen

Alex Carrigan reviews Safe Colors: A Novel in Short Fictions by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Miriam Santana reviews Nobody’s Pilgrims by Sergio Troncoso

Meg Fancher reviews Admit This to No One by Leslie Pietrzyk

Steve Tomasula reviews Hallucinate This! An Authoritized Autobotography of ChatGPT by Mark C. Marino

Richard Wirick reviews You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories, 1981–2018 by John Edgar Wideman

E-feature

The Pitch Clock and the Memoir by E. Ethelbert Miller

Cartographies

Cognitive Mapping Today by Robert T. Tally Jr.

Translation

The Economy of Translation by Brian O’Keeffe

Poetry

Michael Joyce reviews The Collected Poems of Michael Boylan by Michael Boylan

Ilka Scobie reviews Cry Back My Sea: 48 Poems in 6 Waves by Mark C. Marino

Stephanie Rauschenbusch reviews A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems by D. Nurkse

Giorgia Pavlidou reviews Lalia by Adam Cornford

Alana Dagenhart reviews In the Zero of Sky by Tamra Plotnick

Anne Whitehouse reviews Blue If Only I Could Tell You by Richard Tillinghast

Lily Emilina Snider reviews Blood Secrets: Glimpses into the Hidden Lives of the Conversos by Anita Rodriguez, Joan Ryan, and Andrea Watson

Vipra Ghimire reviews My Aunt’s Abortion by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

The Laureates

“It’s Poetry Because I Say So!”: A Conversation with Salome Agbaroji, 2023 National Youth Poet Laureate by Renee H. Shea

Memoir

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995 ed. by Anna von Planta by Matthew Levay

Essays

The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins ed. by Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold by Joe Sacksteder

Printers and Poets

Up the River and into the Words by Charles Alexander

From our Own

Laura Morris reviews Everything I Never Wanted to Know by Christine Hume

Scenes

Punctum Books: An Interview with Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei and Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy

Poetics to Come

Daniel T. O’Hara reviews On Paradox: The Claims of Theory by Elizabeth S. Anker

The Departed

Writing the Present by Heather Love