William Trowbridge's stunning first poetry collection is titled Enter Dark Stranger. And enter he does, in almost every poem, in a series of farcical or chilling disguises: a Buchenwald guard, the Frog Prince, or the folks at home. Us, perhaps? His weapons are a deep puzzlement of feelings and a wonderful ear. He knows how to divert with jokes while he's about to attack: "BLAM, BLAM, BLAM!"

Enter Dark Stranger

Literature & Fiction

TROWBRIDGE, WILLIAM

Poetry

University of Arkansas Press

A ". . . stunning first poetry collection. . . . These poems are howlingly nasty and perfectly executed. . . . Trowbridge's weapons are a deep puzzlement of feeling and a wonderful ear; he knows how to divert with jokes while he's about to attack: 'BLAM BLAM BLAM!'" -San Francisco Chronicle

Enter Dark Stranger: Poems

The Complete Book of Kong

The Complete Book of Kong, by William Trowbridge, gathers the poetic wit, woe, and wisdom of both new and favorite Kong poems from Trowbridge’s books as well as numerous literary magazines and anthologies into a collection that will rattle your cage. Kong is hip and horrendous, always terribly in love with a small screaming blonde, and still bearing the biggest, brightest heart that Hollywood has ever broken. Kong treads fortissimo where mortals fear to go and holds forth in these poems with the fresh, no-nonsense voice that makes Trowbridge one of poetry’s most cutting edge bards.

United States

Southeast Missouri State Univ Press

The Complete Book of Kong gathers the poetic wit, woe,and wisdom of both new and favorite Kong poems into a collection that will rattle your cage. This Kong is undiluted and indomitable, ready for anything from power lunches to paparazzi, from Manhattan to Mambo, from Godzilla to God. He is hip and horrendous, always terribly in love with a screaming blonde, and still bearing the biggest, brightest heart Hollywood has ever broken. Kong treads fortissimo where mortals fear to go and holds forth in these poems with the fresh no-nonsense voice that makes Trowbridge one of poetry's most cutting edge bards. 
Come forth ye canon weary. Behold your inner Kong!

"In his previous collection, Enter Dark Stranger, William Trowbridge established himself alongside Paul Zimmer as America's premier comic poet. In O Paradise, he extends both the range and depth of his vision. This volume goes far beyond comedy. It is about comedy as a mode of survival. Trowbridge writes, 'We stand, befuddled and alone / with one foot in the absolute.' I think of Chaplin in pictures like City Lights, how intimately authentic comedy cohabits with despair, and in O Paradise, how nostalgia demands to be cruelly turned inside out-in the hands of a master, a writer as unrelenting, as exactingly accurate as Bill Trowbridge. -]onathan Holden ,,, "William Trowbridge can talk tough, in the tradition of ﬁction's best hard-boiled private-eye wisenheimers. And like those steely-j awed gumshoes, he can look at the tough sights unflinchingly: at, for instance, the 'brimstone-stinking forests' of World War lI's atrocities, and at the dark side of our domestic confusions, 'where everything . . . goes kerflooey.' But, like the best of those detectives, he has a warm center, and the daily pleasures of small town life, of youthful romance, of family bonds, elicit a poignant wonderment. We have a lot of weird mysteries to solve, we human beings-and I'm glad William Trowbridge is on the case." -Albert Goldbarth "In O Paradise, William Trowbridge has added a new string to his full harp. Although he retains his beguiling and entertaining wit (who but Trowbridge would have the pig open the door and demand the wolf 's search pem1it?), he now faces Old Mortality more squarely than before. There is a new and singular strain of melancholy, but it is a sadness countered by the wisdom and spirit of a mature, highly accomplished artist, creating a powerful new tension in his work." -Paul Zimmer

O Paradise: Poems

History & Criticism

O Paradise: Poems (SIMMs, Arkansas Edition)

Vanishing Point concerns memory, cognition, history, and morality, as experienced through the process of aging and as seen largely through a seriocomic lens. The range is wide, from arrestingly dark to downright hilarious―sometimes both at once―and all stages in-between. The poet Jim Daniels has said about this book, “With profound wit and humility, with a purity and clarity of language that defines our best poetry, [Trowbridge] takes us on a wild ride and gives us our money’s worth.” The last section contains poems from Trowbridge’s graphic chapbook Oldguy: Superhero, with several new poems added to that series.

Vanishing Point

Red Hen Press

This book consists primarily of poems about a character based on the fool archetype, which appears not only in silents and standups (e.g. Keaton, Pryor, Woody Allen) but also in tales running back to the beginning of storytelling. To borrow from Yiddish comedy, he is a combination of schlemiel and schlimazel. The difference is that the schlemiel is a bungler who's always accidentally breaking things and spilling stuff on people and the schlimazel is a sad sack who's always getting his things broken and getting stuff spilled on him. Trowbridge's Fool is both. He is often treated harshly, which seems to come simply from his being a fool. Most fool figures, though comic, are subjected to a great deal of violence. The very term "slapstick" derives from this.

Ship of Fool

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by 'outliving the sons-a-bitches.' With comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—in a hybrid comic-chapbook sure to visually and aurally delight.

Oldguy: Superhero

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

William Trowbridge’s Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems contains work from all five of his full collections, as well as a group of new poems. In lines that capture the rhythms of everyday speech (with the ghost of meter haunting closely along), Trowbridge follows misfits and outcasts whose ramblings and shamblings reflect our own well-meaning gropes for fulfillment. These reader-friendly poems draw often from classic films and other elements of popular culture—from Buster Keaton to Chuck Berry, from King Kong to Wile E. Coyote. Trowbridge is not squeamish about exploring the darker side of humanity, as in poems about the Kiss of Death, delivered by Michael Corleone in The Godfather II, or Nebraskan mass murderer Charles Starkweather. Capping off the book, a group of new poems takes a fresh look at old themes, sounding deepened notes of both melancholy and celebration. Throughout this seriocomic account of human foibles, vices, and wonders, Trowbridge makes a strong case for laughter as the only appropriate response to our post-post-modern condition.

Put This On, Please: New & Selected Poems

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TROWBRIDGE, WILLIAM. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by TROWBRIDGE, WILLIAM

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TROWBRIDGE, WILLIAM. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Enter Dark Stranger

Enter Dark Stranger: Poems

The Complete Book of Kong

The Complete Book of Kong

O Paradise: Poems

O Paradise: Poems (SIMMs, Arkansas Edition)

Vanishing Point

Ship of Fool

Oldguy: Superhero

Put This On, Please: New & Selected Poems