cover image Stealer's Wheel

Stealer's Wheel

Christopher Stroffolino. Hard Press, $12.95 (109pp) ISBN 978-1-889097-23-7

A circus-like, almost Dylanesque threading together of fish, Phish and failed loves (""I'd rather be a suicide than a spectator""), Stroffolino's poems are consistently rollicking and cerebral. This second full-length collection, like the New York-based poet's earlier book and numerous chaps, is groaning with ideas (""I woofed down the present, the whole contemporary era""), syllogisms and their converses: ""The pie that shrinks when more people/ want a piece of it is false."" Many of the poems try to process the confluence of capital and ""father culture,"" singing out at the first sign of disingenuousness: ""The cacophony of the status quo propped up/ by occasional claims of subversion. Amorality/ of the public domain disguised as morality/ to confer upon the domestic sphere the status of Miller Time--..."" If some of the critiques, reeled off in ropey, non-stop sentences, don't seem to fit comfortably within the lines here, it may be because Stroffolino hasn't quite found a form capacious enough to convey them. The poems centered on relationships, however, hit an endearing note of confusion and care: ""We made love in the hospital bed,/ posed downtown policemen for our scrapbook,/...The question of jealousy/ never came up, and when it did, it was only to applaud us for keeping our cool."" A co-editor of Talisman's New (American) Poetry anthology (a PW best book), Stroffolino remains a poet to watch. (Feb.)