Chris Stroffolino. Stealer’s Wheel. West Stockbridge, Mass.: Hard Press, 1999. 109 pp. $12.95

Chris Stroffolino’s trademark device is the meandering metaphor or simile that awkwardly spills into the next several lines, changing shape and tone unexpectedly. Awkwardness, far from being a defect in this case, is the marker of an improvisational method: the poet does not know in advance where his train of thought will lead him, or how he will emerge from the syntactical mess into which he has dug himself. This typical sentence, from a poem entitled “The Comedy of It All,” ends with a pair of prepositions tacked on to the end of relative clause:

.... And lovers are like language, mediums
that become a message only when the messenger is Mexico
and then Maine, never torn between deep sanity and Spain
except when seen from the eyes painted on a totalizing train
stuck at the station where the tracks meeting at the vanishing point
are as equidistant from either of our local heresies as the blood
we can’t believe is breathing in any brains but these of paper pens
behind our backs which would shut the sliver with standards
too high to be the nothing we can’t help but live up to.

This passage, chosen almost at random, exemplifies the verbal and intellectual pleasures offered to the reader in Stealer’s Wheel. The inevitable comparison is with Ashbery and with the New York school generally: the digressive syntax, the defamiliarization of commonplace expressions (in this case “the medium is the message” and “high standards”), the shifts of tone, the brilliant “one-liners,” and the mixed metaphors are all recognizably “Ashberian.” Stroffolino, however, avoids the polished surfaces, the reticent elegance, of Ashbery’s New Yorker poems. His predominant tone is rougher, warmer, and more engaging. His humor is also broader, his point of view less coyly expressed. He has a definite “attitude”: “The self-proclaimed cripple loses her case / When the defense shows a videotape of her / Wrestling in coleslaw.” Or: “The word revolution caught sleeping / on the job is punished by being promoted.” Or “Pepsi cups / that had this nasty habit of turning into Grecian Urns.”
As these examples reveal, Stroffolino is irresistibly quotable. A series of his one-liners, taken out of context, would make a perfectly acceptable paratactic poem such as those favored by some of the “language poets.” Instead of lining up short, clever sentences in a row, however, he prefers more expansive structures. The result is not diffuseness but rather a feeling of imaginative freedeom. He also achieves a more concentrated intensity in a poem like “Sirhan Sirhan,” one of my personal favorites in this rich book. I quote only the first few lines:

Solitude has begun to burn the log of self
but the two have not become the unity
of which ash is the visible half-truth.
Foolish ash, who prides yourself
on being the only child of the marriage
of log and flame. You can only
sing through sisters of air. But dualism
denies debate. Log turns ash. Flame becomes air.

This is Stroffolino at his most inspired. Even in less remarkable poems, however, he is an exceptional poet, consistently alert, intelligent, and stimulating. I recommend Stealer’s Wheel to all readers who are hungry for a poetry that engages the intellect and the ear at the highest possible level.

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This is my brief review of Stroffolino, which was solicited and never published in St. Louis rag Delmar. I don't think I agree with it any longer. I still think the book is good, and for some of the reasons I enumerate, but I would take a different approach now, emphasizing variety of poems and de-emphasizing the Asbhery comparison. Of course, three of four years have passed.