Why can’t being in the middle of something be me?
ABOUT
Pasquale Trozzolo is an entrepreneur and founder of Trozzolo Communications Group, one of the Midwest’s leading advertising and public relations firms. In addition to building his business, he also spent time as a racecar driver and grad school professor. Then, just before the pandemic, he found himself semi-retired and with too much time on his hands.
His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. The Poetry Box published his debut chapbook, Before the Distance, in December 2020. His second chapbook, Un/Reconciled, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.
Still no tattoos, or MFA, he lives in Kansas, USA, with Joan, his wife of 50 years and counting.
In ongoing efforts to complicate my life, I began living out as many retirement clichés as possible. Why not try poetry? The problem is, after a lifetime of ignoring it—I fell in love. Dickinson’s I Cannot Dance upon My Toes inspired me to keep at it. Then I read Tell Me by Kim Addonizio and was devastated by her talent. Still, I continued. I hit the books to learn and read several textbooks with words like villanelle, pantoum, and sestina. And I enrolled in online poetry classes at both Oxford University and Stanford. And now, several years (and a library full of poetry) later, I keep trying, writing a little every day.
BOOKS
Before the Distance: Virus Poems
By Pasquale Trozzolo
The COVID-19 pandemic had us all sheltering at home, and with all that shelter comes time to reflect, and with all that reflection comes truth. From that truth, if we are lucky, comes poetry. Before the Distance visits what we miss, our longing for whatever normal once was. It also visits our fears and helps us conquer them. And yes, among our longing and fears there is optimism and hope that all the missing will be for good. For good: that would be good, maybe even better than Before the Distance.
UN/Reconciled: Poems of a Love Gone Off
By Pasquale Trozzolo
Un/Reconciled is a story of a love gone off told through a collection of poems. It reminds couples that relationships take work even when in a powerful love. It is essential to capture the magnetic tension experienced in the first weeks of the relationship and find ways to keep discovering it even as the mundane of ordinary life interferes.
PRESS AND PUBLICATIONS
Pasquale’s work also appears in: Sunspot Literary Journal, The Pangolin Review, 34th Parallel, From Whispers to Roars, 50 Give or Take, Wingless Dreamer, Last Leaves, Tiny Seed Journal, Red Coyote, Superpresent Magazine and Synkroniciti Magazine.
