“Combining the sense of life of James Wright with the satire of Kurt Vonnegut, William Trowbridge reveals the grotesque beneath the commonplace: ‘Think of Karloff’s monster,/full of lonely love but too hideous/to bear.’ Sparkling poems ‘full of lonely love’ search behind the Halloween mask of terror (the ‘dark stranger’) for the meaning of the American landscape. Trowbridge’s sophisticated eye records the excesses of pop culture and ‘normal’ American provincial life with obsessive deadpan. His snapshots of social reality embody something tragicomic. Searching ‘the old neighborhoods for clues: initials in a sidewalk, / a rusty nail pounded in a tree, a wish still floating / near the school,’ Trowbridge is a dispassionate and superb recorder in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson.”
—Frank Allen, Poet Lore, Winter 1990-91

“In the sequence of Kong poems, Kong asks our indulgence. The comedy is the sentimental one of the monster humanized; we recognize that in suffering we wear a mask, and that mask protects, perhaps distances, the person behind it from the pain of the persona. There may be an awful unease in our response; in amusement we are aware we cannot hate Kong, for there is nothing funny about someone we genuinely hate (Hitler, say). But on some level the poet asks us to identify with the power he exercises in adopting the persona. (The unease may be akin to our response at the movies, when Jolson or Irene Dunne suddenly appear in blackface.) The identification between the poet and the persona may be closer than is comfortable for laughs; it should be clear, for instance, that a large part of Randy Newman’s effectiveness when he takes on the persona of a good ole boy is that he is an L.A. Jew taking on the persona. To the extent that we are likely to see the identification between poet and persona as close, we will feel, if we are that person’s victim, the blurry self-censure of our indulgence rather than the fierce entreaching of stable irony. It might do, then, merely to note that in each Kong poem the conceit is applied to a different moment of the white male purview: ‘Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears,’ ‘Having Thought Better of a Shootout, Kong Consents to Rhumba Lessons,’ ‘Kong Turns Critic,’ ‘Kong Answers the Call for a Few Good Men,’ ‘Viet Kong,’ etc. One reads Enter Dark Stranger fondly; it is in the grain.”
—Jeff Hamilton, Black Warrior Review, Fall/Winter, 1990