In Fight or Flight: Poems from a Turbulent Time, Michael Comiskey turns a keen-and often wry-eye toward contemporary American life.
Drawing on nearly seven decades of observing a changing nation, Comiskey explores the American experience of the mid- to late-2020s through humor, irony, lament, and occasional celebration. Technology, politics, environmental change, patriotism, modern poetry, and the complications of simply living through a turbulent era all come under his gaze.
Employing both traditional and nontraditional poetic forms, Comiskey moves between the serious and the absurd, examining the anxieties, losses, contradictions, and unexpected joys of the current moment. His background as a longtime professor of political science and economics informs the collection, but these poems reach beyond politics to consider something broader: what it means to live in America at this particular point in its history.