O, Democracy! - Hardcover

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of the typewriter poetry collective Poems While You Wait. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Allure, the Believer, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is the author of For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs and Robinson Alone. She lives in Chicago.

Memoirist and poet Rooney (Robinson Alone, 2012) proves to be a shrewdly involving and acidly witty novelist. Building on her experiences working for U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Rooney ushers us into political backrooms through the eyes and insomnia-addled mind of smart, idiosyncratically stylish, earnest yet spiky Colleen Dugan, a photographer turned staffer. It’s 2008, and Illinois’ junior senator is making a historic run for the presidency while the down-to-earth senior senator is running for reelection against a despicably unscrupulous opponent. In the Chicago office, Colleen spars with the flirtatiously harassing, shark-like chief of staff (O, Sexism!), fumes over disappointing assignments, wishes she was taking pictures, and worries about her army reservist father in Iraq. Finally, as Colleen watches the divide between democratic ideals and political pragmatism widen precipitously, she confronts a moral dilemma of immense repercussions. By focusing on the everyday minutiae, absurdities, and mounting pressures of one ambitious, increasingly conflicted political staffer’s life—all avidly observed and commented on, strangely enough, by a ghostly chorus of Founding Fathers—Rooney revamps and revitalizes political satire to powerfully comedic and resonant effect. --Donna Seaman