In his latest laugh-out-loud book of political verse, Calvin Trillin provides a riotous depiction of the 2012 presidential election campaign. Dogfight is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other poems and occasionally by what the author calls a pause for prose (';Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough'). With the same barbed wit he displayed in the bestsellers Deciding the Next Decider, Obliviously On He Sails, and A Heckuva Job, America's deadline poet trains his sights on the Tea Party (';These folks were quick to vocally condemn/All handouts but the ones that went to them') and the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican nomination (';Though first-tier candidates were mostly out,/Republicans were asking, ';What about/The second tier or what about the third?/Has nothing from those other tiers been heard?'). There is an ode to Michele Bachmann, sung to the tune of a Beatles classic (';Michele, our belle/Thinks that gays will all be sent to hell') and passages on the exit of candidates like Herman Cain (';Although his patter in debates could tickle,/Cain's pool of knowledge seemed less pool than trickle') and Rick Santorum (';The race will miss the purity/That you alone endow./We'll never find another man/Who's holier than thou.') On its way to the November 6 finale, Trillin's narrative takes us through such highlights as the January caucuses in frigid Iowa (';To listen to long speeches is your duty,/And getting there could freeze off your patootie'), the Republican convention (';It seemed like Clint, his chair, and their vignette/Had wandered in from some adjoining set'), and Mitt Romney's secretly recorded ';47 percent' speech, which inspired the ';I Got the Mitt Thinks I'm a Moocher, a Taker not a Maker, Blues.'From the Hardcover edition.