About the Author

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.

Reviews

"If poetry doesn't make anything happen, at least poetry this well written and focused, this concise and yet comprehensive, provides an ethical, moral, and aesthetic compass. Truth and true poetry, hard to come by, but in David Starkey's book it keeps us from forgetting the lies and corporate self-serving cant-damage to the language and our country-we have endured. This kind of poetry keeps our collective shoulder to the wheel." Christopher Buckley
"Many of us asked, 'Wait, what just happened?!' with increasing alarm, outrage, and exhaustion over the course of Donald J. Trump's term in office. Now David Starkey offers an unexpected and strangely satisfying answer in What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency. At the rate of 17 syllables per week (a sly echo of the character constraint of a Tweet), Starkey's tonally dexterous poems both chronicle and satirize the Trump years. The result is a book that renders the burden of not forgetting not only more bearable but less bleak-a modest miracle." Catherine Abbey Hodges
"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