Finalist in the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards

The UnPresidented Presidential Campaign (from the preface) by Megan Baldrige:

I had a dream in which I was examining candidate Trump’s report card; I awoke anxiously clutching my pillow case but couldn’t remember the contents of what I had seen. So I forced myself to imagine what Donald J Trump’s pre-school teacher would have noticed about an outlandish student. Thus began a series of poems about Trump, the candidate, and eventually about Trump, the president. As I tried to understand Trump’s unusual appeal, I felt a strong missionary urge— a poetic yearning— to approximate in poetry a small aspect of his presidential unprecedentedness. During a year in which I wrote more than 30 poems about Trump, I never imagined amassing so many poems about a man so inappropriately behaved. In fact, I continually tried to stop writing about Trump. But then he would do something so unpresidential and so ridiculous, and I would once again be pulled to put pen to paper. I hope that completing this book of poems about our unprecedented President, will allow me to move along. I am interested in the distinction of being a poet who learned how to write biting poems about unprecedented behavior and then was wise enough to graduate and learn something useful, like how to make purple pasta out of beets.

Unpresidentally yours,

Megan

Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 2017.

Poetry Playhouse Publications

Paperback, 6 x 9

76 pages

Cover design by Denise Weaver Ross

About Megan Baldrige:

I like to write light-hearted but serious poetry about politics, knitting, dogs and gardens. And sometimes garden bugs. I am a retired English teacher, former dog-owner, present knitter and gardener who often thinks of poem ideas in the middle of the night that make me chuckle in the dark. So I write them down the next day and then add to them and add to them, then subtract and winnow, and burnish and polish, and then— there's a poem.

And so a book of poetry is built, over a year.