Maintenance

'I’ve written before that William Trowbridge is one of America’s best and wittiest poets: funny, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding. Having just read his new collection, Maintenance, I’m pleased to say that I was right. Whether he tackles being a boy or a teenager, being the new guy in a tin can factory, or a college teacher on the low end of the adjunct scale, Trowbridge tells it like it was, and like it is: occasionally grim, but replete with humor and such good writing that, if it wouldn’t scare my wife , I’d stand up from my desk and cheer.' -Charles Harper Webb, author of Sidebend World'Maintenance is a sharp, funny, and unflinching look at American life past and present. William Trowbridge writes with clear-eyed wit and deep compassion, turning our everyday messes and momentary wins into acrobatic, virtuosic art. These accomplished poems remind us that maintenance-of language, of history, of ourselves-is both necessary and absurd. A wise, wry, and humane collection, Trowbridge remains one of America’s most engaging and generous poetic voices. A joy to read!'-Elizabeth Powell, author of Atomizer'William Trowbridge’s newest collection of poems, Maintenance, grapples with the Sisyphean tasks of upkeep and repair against the inevitable vicissitudes of entropy, decay, complacency, and despair. Maintenance considers what it means to be entangled within the violent machineries of war, industry, capital and stuck, Groundhog Day-esque, in cyclical patterns that reveal the foibles and failings of human nature. With his trademark piercing wit and searing intelligence, Trowbridge peels back the histories we collectively seem doomed to repeat-familial, national, global. These poems navigate childhood memory, labor, and constructions of American masculinity. Trowbridge raises a glass to both the folly and horror of the end times in elegiac and gracefully rendered lines-ruefully hilarious, ekphrastic and elegant-confirming the enduring power of art in the midst of absurdity.'-Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50