Pasquale Trozzolo explores the pandemic, a relationship, and small-town life.
I’ve discovered that I increasingly enjoy being able to see more than one collection by a poet, and sometimes all of their poetry at once. I find myself looking for the words “collected” or “complete” in poetry titles. I may have developed a small addiction to Library of America collections of both fiction and poetry.
If I don’t have the “collected” works of a poet, you can do something like it – and read all what a poet has published. It can be relatively easy with a more recently published poet.
Pasquale Trozzolo, a self-described “retired madman from Kansas,” is chairman of his own advertising and public relations firm in Kansas City. In 2020, as the pandemic lockdown descended, he turned to poetry.
Before the Distance is the first of Trozzolo’s three collections, and its 21 poems relate to the pandemic. A graduating senior wonders if she’ll have a ceremony. Millions wondered what isolation would remove them from – like a smile or a kiss. We sensed we were missing more than that, but we weren’t sure exactly what that might be. He has poems for all of these subjects.
As he writes in one point, we often turned to social media for community, singing, dancing, teaching, painting, and sharing poetry (some of it bad) (maybe a lot of it was bad).
Cope-outs
Yes, that’s me
And I’m not alone.
We’re everywhere.
Facebook, Insta, the Tube and Twit
Everywhere.
Teaching, singing, dancing, painting.
Some of us share bad poems.
Brave cope-outs
That’s who we are.
If you haven’t tried it
Go ahead. Cope out!
You’ll feel better.
Guaranteed.
More like a chapbook Before the Distance is comprised of simple poems with simple language, with adjectives and adverbs severely rationed. And I found myself liking it even more each time I read it.
The theme of isolation continues with Trozzolo’s second collection, UN/Reconciled, but it’s not the isolation of a pandemic. Instead, it’s what happens from a lost love and the often-jarring sense of reality that follows.
In 28 poems, he tells the story of a relationship. Each poem is introduced by a short prose description, starting with how the relationship started and developed, and then how it ended and what followed. It is somewhere in the middle of the poems that relationship comes to end.
Over
As if I didn’t already know
you told me.
I’m not sure why but
it was still a surprise.
The signs were showing
for weeks, maybe longer.
I hoped for less pain
but this trouble moves slowly.
My air is lousy with
your lingering germs.
Months pass, yet my tangled thoughts
raise high on poor attempts to forget.
Painfully similar to yesterday,
I smell you for hours.
Even on this new day
all I see is the morning moon.
Stubborn it hangs
still in the air, barely visible.
Now, just a scarce glow it falls
like me—only seen in the dark.
But, of course, the relationship’s not really over. It’s followed by the blame, the recriminations, the what-ifs, the search for understanding, and trying to find a way forward.
Trozzolo continues with his simple, declarative language and keeps adjectives and adverbs to a minimum. It struck me that Un/Reconciled is a series of related poems that seem to cry out from personal experience.
His third collection, published in 2024, has a style similar to the first two volumes but a decidedly different subject or theme. Seeing from a Small Town is exactly that – used real and imaged observations about life and people in a small town. As he explains in his introduction, just passing through (or flying over) means you will miss much of what there is to see in small-town America.
You find observations about an Airbnb, quiet in the library, the check-out line at the Dollar Store, what’s missing in the cemetery, what happens in a tornado warning, and even what might happen at the local bar / pizza parlor.
Pizza at Casey’s
What if we met in a bar
What if we drank bourbon
What if it was 10:00 p.m.
What if there was a dark corner?
What if we met on a train
What if I asked what you’re reading
What if you read poems
What if I knew all the lines?
What if we met in a gallery
What if we loved the same art
What if you asked me to hold your hand
What if we didn’t stop there?
What if I saw your red dress
What if we met on the dance floor
What if I knew how to tango
What if you liked my embrace?
Pasquale Trozzolo
Trozzolo has published poems in a number of literary journals and magazines, including the Sunspot Literary Journal, The Pangolin Review, 34th Parallel, Tiny Seed Journal, Red Coyote, and Synkroniciti, among many others. A graduate of Rockhurst University, he is chairman of the Kansas City-based Trozzolo Communications Group, an advertising and public relations firm. He lives in Kansas. (I can’t personally speak to whether he is really a retired madman.)
I felt a kinship with all three collections. I suspect Trozzolo had, at some point, a similar kind of news / journalism / marketing writing study and learning that I had. Flowery language is avoided. Kill all the adverbs! Murder most of the adjectives! Telling people what or how to think is wrong (I’d never make it in the news business today). Simple narrative reporting – describing what you see (“Just the facts, ma’am) is vastly preferable to editorializing everything you write.
You may not become a social media influencer or best-selling author, but you will come to recognize and appreciate straightforward reporting.
Photo by Nathalie, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: The Three Collections of Pasquale Trozzolo - September 11, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Boris Dralyuk and “My Hollywood” - September 9, 2025
- When You Don’t Speak Czech or German - September 4, 2025
Leave a Reply