Poetry review – THE 50, VOLUME 2: Charles Rammelkamp relishes some broad and pretty unsubtle humor in an anthology edited by J.T. Whitehead
The 50, volume 2
J.T. Whitehead (ed)
Head Hunt Press, 2026
$10.00, 106 pages
ISBN: 9798248811809
Editor J.T. Whitehead has assembled a collection of fifty satirical poems in this volume, reprints of poems that have previously been published, by such witty poets as Denise Duhamel, Paul Fericano, Edward Field, Ron Koertge, K. Lipschutz, and Gerald Locklin. Face it, who couldn’t use a spot of humor in times like these?
The collection is divided into five sections – people, pop, writers, gods, and a two-poem category (Koertge and Duhamel) called the end. The collection is dedicated to Paul Fericano, whose “Ode to Henny Youngman” graces the back cover: ‘Take my poem, please.’
The first section, people, includes poems about random people, like Locklin’s “My Kinda Guy,” about two friends talking in a bar around closing time. One asks, ‘You got any beer at your place?’ His companion proceeds to describe the various drugs he can offer – pot, coke, heroin. To which the first responds: ‘Yeah, but do you have any beer?’ In “Victor,” Denise Duhamel writes about a frisky handyman who is hitting on her as he finishes repairing her kitchen cabinets, soon after her break-up with her ex. She puts him off by inventing a new lover, Victor, but she starts having regrets when he hands her the bubble wrap and says, ‘keep this
I know you like bubble wrap, which seems like
the most romantic thing anyone has ever said
to you and that this handyman knows you
better than any man ever has…
When the handyman leaves, he shakes her hand,
and says just for the record I hate Victor’s guts
and you almost say me too
Edward Field’s “Male Manifesto” from the people section is likewise hysterical:
Coming is overrated, and in the long run
falls into the category of a good sneeze.
The body’s best trick is erection,
holding up the universe on your finger.
Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and the old comic strip character Nancy make appearances in the pop section in poems by Fericano, Koertge and Field respectively, and Duhamel offers the first of several poems involving Barbie. “Kinky” begins with Ken and Barbie exchanging heads and proceeds from there:
Ken wants to feel Barbie’s toes between his lips,
take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her
In “who took the bite out of the apple?” Gerald Locklin skewers John and Yoko, and Ron Koertge’s “Song of Myselfie” is a sort of rant about the compulsion people have to take photographs of themselves in every conceivable situation with absolutely everybody and everything and post them online.
Edward Field’s “Graffiti” is an uproarious poem about a guy who breaks into a public restroom that’s being demolished and cuts out an old partition with lurid messages and drawings, telephone numbers, and glory holes ‘with dried come encrusted on the rim / decorated with lips of mouth and cunt.’ He takes the wall, ‘the size of a school blackboard,’ and hangs it in his house. The poem ends:
Respecting tradition
he charged everyone a nickel to see it.
But as you can imagine, it’s in the writers section where the poets have their most wicked fun. Koertge’s “I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend” and Fericano’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning is Committed to an Asylum” start the section, followed by K. Lipschutz’s “Dr. Know”:
The poetry professor has a name for everything
The bastard!
Fericano’s “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” is a long, hilarious spoof of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and Duhamel’s “Literary Barbie” channels Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In the end, after experiencing very unfamiliar sensations (pleasure?), Barbie ‘wakes up, immobile, / plastic, looking entirely like somebody else.’ Ron Koertge’s “Truth & Beauty” starts out, ‘Joined at the hip ever since Keats / opened his big yap’ and goes on to recount their break-up.
But wait. Then there are gods, always a rich, potent theme for satire! Edward Field has several poems in this section, including “Columbian Joke,” in which God creates Washington, D.C., “At the Gates of Heaven,” a hilarious narrative about three nuns who die in a car crash and have to answer Saint Peter’s quiz before being admitted past the pearly gates, “Ganesh,” a poem about a Hindu elephant, and “A Jew on Christmas,” about the trials of the holiday season.
Denise Duhamel gives us “Antichrist Barbie” and “Buddhist Barbie,” in which the tidy fashionista ‘wonders how a man / with such a belly could pose, / smiling, and without a shirt.’ Duhamel’s Barbie poems, by the way, predate Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed movie; they’re all from her 1997 collection, Kinky. K. Lipschitz’s “Working Vacation” reads:
We visited our sins,
who had families of their own
and pets named after us.
And the end? Ron Koertge writes about a funeral in “1989” that ends with ‘a roomful of people laughing and crying, taking off / their sunglasses to blot their inconsolable eyes’ when the seeing-eye dogs of the blind cover their ears at the soloist’s screechy rendition of “Abide with Me.” In “Signs and No Signs” Duhamel writes about her sister, waiting at a stoplight, reeling from their mother’s death, when a man shouts at her that she’s in the wrong lane! ‘The beauty / pageant contestants are in / the lane over there!’
These delightful poems provide a welcome distraction from the mishigas of the news, the craziness of the modern world. Nothing like laughter, after all, to buck up one’s spirits, not to mention the sheer admiration one experiences in the company of comic genius.
Jun 18 2026
THE 50, VOLUME 2
Poetry review – THE 50, VOLUME 2: Charles Rammelkamp relishes some broad and pretty unsubtle humor in an anthology edited by J.T. Whitehead
The 50, volume 2
J.T. Whitehead (ed)
Head Hunt Press, 2026
$10.00, 106 pages
ISBN: 9798248811809
Editor J.T. Whitehead has assembled a collection of fifty satirical poems in this volume, reprints of poems that have previously been published, by such witty poets as Denise Duhamel, Paul Fericano, Edward Field, Ron Koertge, K. Lipschutz, and Gerald Locklin. Face it, who couldn’t use a spot of humor in times like these?
The collection is divided into five sections – people, pop, writers, gods, and a two-poem category (Koertge and Duhamel) called the end. The collection is dedicated to Paul Fericano, whose “Ode to Henny Youngman” graces the back cover: ‘Take my poem, please.’
The first section, people, includes poems about random people, like Locklin’s “My Kinda Guy,” about two friends talking in a bar around closing time. One asks, ‘You got any beer at your place?’ His companion proceeds to describe the various drugs he can offer – pot, coke, heroin. To which the first responds: ‘Yeah, but do you have any beer?’ In “Victor,” Denise Duhamel writes about a frisky handyman who is hitting on her as he finishes repairing her kitchen cabinets, soon after her break-up with her ex. She puts him off by inventing a new lover, Victor, but she starts having regrets when he hands her the bubble wrap and says, ‘keep this
I know you like bubble wrap, which seems like
the most romantic thing anyone has ever said
to you and that this handyman knows you
better than any man ever has…
When the handyman leaves, he shakes her hand,
and says just for the record I hate Victor’s guts
and you almost say me too
Edward Field’s “Male Manifesto” from the people section is likewise hysterical:
Coming is overrated, and in the long run
falls into the category of a good sneeze.
The body’s best trick is erection,
holding up the universe on your finger.
Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and the old comic strip character Nancy make appearances in the pop section in poems by Fericano, Koertge and Field respectively, and Duhamel offers the first of several poems involving Barbie. “Kinky” begins with Ken and Barbie exchanging heads and proceeds from there:
Ken wants to feel Barbie’s toes between his lips,
take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her
In “who took the bite out of the apple?” Gerald Locklin skewers John and Yoko, and Ron Koertge’s “Song of Myselfie” is a sort of rant about the compulsion people have to take photographs of themselves in every conceivable situation with absolutely everybody and everything and post them online.
Edward Field’s “Graffiti” is an uproarious poem about a guy who breaks into a public restroom that’s being demolished and cuts out an old partition with lurid messages and drawings, telephone numbers, and glory holes ‘with dried come encrusted on the rim / decorated with lips of mouth and cunt.’ He takes the wall, ‘the size of a school blackboard,’ and hangs it in his house. The poem ends:
Respecting tradition
he charged everyone a nickel to see it.
But as you can imagine, it’s in the writers section where the poets have their most wicked fun. Koertge’s “I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend” and Fericano’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning is Committed to an Asylum” start the section, followed by K. Lipschutz’s “Dr. Know”:
The poetry professor has a name for everything
The bastard!
Fericano’s “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” is a long, hilarious spoof of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and Duhamel’s “Literary Barbie” channels Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In the end, after experiencing very unfamiliar sensations (pleasure?), Barbie ‘wakes up, immobile, / plastic, looking entirely like somebody else.’ Ron Koertge’s “Truth & Beauty” starts out, ‘Joined at the hip ever since Keats / opened his big yap’ and goes on to recount their break-up.
But wait. Then there are gods, always a rich, potent theme for satire! Edward Field has several poems in this section, including “Columbian Joke,” in which God creates Washington, D.C., “At the Gates of Heaven,” a hilarious narrative about three nuns who die in a car crash and have to answer Saint Peter’s quiz before being admitted past the pearly gates, “Ganesh,” a poem about a Hindu elephant, and “A Jew on Christmas,” about the trials of the holiday season.
Denise Duhamel gives us “Antichrist Barbie” and “Buddhist Barbie,” in which the tidy fashionista ‘wonders how a man / with such a belly could pose, / smiling, and without a shirt.’ Duhamel’s Barbie poems, by the way, predate Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed movie; they’re all from her 1997 collection, Kinky. K. Lipschitz’s “Working Vacation” reads:
We visited our sins,
who had families of their own
and pets named after us.
And the end? Ron Koertge writes about a funeral in “1989” that ends with ‘a roomful of people laughing and crying, taking off / their sunglasses to blot their inconsolable eyes’ when the seeing-eye dogs of the blind cover their ears at the soloist’s screechy rendition of “Abide with Me.” In “Signs and No Signs” Duhamel writes about her sister, waiting at a stoplight, reeling from their mother’s death, when a man shouts at her that she’s in the wrong lane! ‘The beauty / pageant contestants are in / the lane over there!’
These delightful poems provide a welcome distraction from the mishigas of the news, the craziness of the modern world. Nothing like laughter, after all, to buck up one’s spirits, not to mention the sheer admiration one experiences in the company of comic genius.