Poetry review – PANDEMONIUM: Charles Rammelkamp is quite happy to follow Lenny Dellarocca through this selection of imaginative prose-poem narratives
Pandemonium
Lenny Dellarocca
Slipstream Press, 2025
$15.00, 32 pages
‘It’s possible an engine could suddenly appear in your parlor. It’s possible an equation was overlooked by the robot that discovered fire. It’s possible the Tin Man is listening to your conversations,’ Lenny Dellarocca writes in the title piece of the twenty-five prose poems that make up his enchanting 2025 Slipstream Chapbook prizewinning collection. These punchy poems are drenched in the logic of dreams. Yes, anything can happen. And it does. The only thing that is reliably consistent in Pandemonium is the speaker’s voice, as he guides us through the dreamscapes.
Sometimes Dellarocca seems to be teasing us with his logic, challenging the reader to make his/her own connections. “Crime Scenes” starts with the narrator telling his partner-in-crime (‘Natalie Wood in your mother’s clothes’) about talking on the phone with a detective, who seems to be tracking this partner down – ‘in jail for yanking necklaces from tourists.’ Meanwhile, the narrator is in cahoots with a woman who goes by a fake name who is tracking him down. The piece ends: ‘She wanted her money. Showed up with a man with one eye. It was the detective.’
The next piece, “Herlong Mansion” opens on a memory of sitting in the gazebo there (Herlong Mansion is a romantic getaway bed-and-breakfast in Micanopy, FL, listed in the National Register of Historic Places). Later, the narrator asks the person he’s with to retrieve his walking stick. It ends: ‘I stole it from the entryway. Have you seen it. A wooden bird’s-head handle with a glass bead for an eye. The other eye’s missing.’
Wait, the reader (me) asks himself. Does this have anything to do with the one-eyed detective in the preceding “Crime Scenes”? Is the person the speaker is talking to the woman who’d been in jail for stealing necklaces?
Or take the character Hal from the first poem, “Fall,” who, with his companions Tom, Carl, and Margaret may be looking for a meteorite, unless that’s just a metaphor for a cure for cancer (‘Carl believes given enough space anything can happen.’). Is Hal the same Hal in “Samarra” who shows up in a strange town with the narrator, who insinuate themselves among the locals? ‘Hal got the job and I started the play-acting group.’
Samarra, where in an ancient Mesopotamian tale a merchant encounters Death in the marketplace. Or is this something akin to pareidolia, seeing animal faces in clouds and whatnot? Who is Hal? Who is the narrator?
But in the next piece, “Sedona,” the narrator is accompanied by Marie as they blow into another town, again as if making a getaway, one step ahead of the law. It’s another religious experience in the middle of the Arizona town. ‘It made me think of baptism right there in the middle of the street.’ Buddha, Jesus, Quan Yin in the scent of sandalwood incense. ‘The joker in me wanted to say, Where’s Elvis, but I held my tongue for once.’
“Redland” is another in which this inclination to escape, the kind of free-floating impulse we feel in dreams with no specific reason behind it, features like an unspoken plot point. It’s Florida again (a native New Yorker, Dellarocca has lived and worked in south Florida for years). ‘There were woodpeckers having a field day out there.’ An ill-tempered, unpredictable boyfriend seems to be leaning on, oppressing his companions, Ludie, Grace, and even the narrator. ‘He was the kind of guy who believed in things.’ We all know the type, vague though it sounds. “Redland” ends: ‘Grace said, Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ They scram!
“I Should Have Left Pieces of Myself in the Walls” is another that involves fleeing, leaving the past behind. “In the film, a woman who spent most of her life moving from one town to another” has the habit of stuffing little notes in the places she’s abandoning. It makes the narrator wistful. ‘I wish I thought to leave a note in each of the houses I’ve lived in: a line or two from Stanger from a Strange Land….’
“Fame Dream,” “Waves Dream,” “The Dancing Plague” (‘I dreamed my grandmother was possessed with fever. Watched her twist into shapes with my dream’s eye.’) all shine the spotlight on the dream logic that drives (“drives”? Maybe more like “floats”) Lenny Dellarocca’s beguiling prose poems, all of them densely worded, single-paragraph narratives in the voice of this nebulous narrator who carries us across the universe. Who is this narrator? Does it matter? It’s like the omniscient voiceover in a movie that we can’t really visualize but trust nevertheless as it guides us through the dream.
‘How we feel about ourselves in the world is the wrong question,’ a museum docent tells his patrons at the beginning of “Outsiders.” The narrator, forever a skeptic, listens with thinning patience. and in the middle of the docent’s spiel he accidentally farts loudly. ‘And once again I have made a spectacle of myself,’ he concludes. ‘Once again, I matter.’
Once again, anything can happen. And it does.
Oct 22 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Lenny Dellarocca
Poetry review – PANDEMONIUM: Charles Rammelkamp is quite happy to follow Lenny Dellarocca through this selection of imaginative prose-poem narratives
‘It’s possible an engine could suddenly appear in your parlor. It’s possible an equation was overlooked by the robot that discovered fire. It’s possible the Tin Man is listening to your conversations,’ Lenny Dellarocca writes in the title piece of the twenty-five prose poems that make up his enchanting 2025 Slipstream Chapbook prizewinning collection. These punchy poems are drenched in the logic of dreams. Yes, anything can happen. And it does. The only thing that is reliably consistent in Pandemonium is the speaker’s voice, as he guides us through the dreamscapes.
Sometimes Dellarocca seems to be teasing us with his logic, challenging the reader to make his/her own connections. “Crime Scenes” starts with the narrator telling his partner-in-crime (‘Natalie Wood in your mother’s clothes’) about talking on the phone with a detective, who seems to be tracking this partner down – ‘in jail for yanking necklaces from tourists.’ Meanwhile, the narrator is in cahoots with a woman who goes by a fake name who is tracking him down. The piece ends: ‘She wanted her money. Showed up with a man with one eye. It was the detective.’
The next piece, “Herlong Mansion” opens on a memory of sitting in the gazebo there (Herlong Mansion is a romantic getaway bed-and-breakfast in Micanopy, FL, listed in the National Register of Historic Places). Later, the narrator asks the person he’s with to retrieve his walking stick. It ends: ‘I stole it from the entryway. Have you seen it. A wooden bird’s-head handle with a glass bead for an eye. The other eye’s missing.’
Wait, the reader (me) asks himself. Does this have anything to do with the one-eyed detective in the preceding “Crime Scenes”? Is the person the speaker is talking to the woman who’d been in jail for stealing necklaces?
Or take the character Hal from the first poem, “Fall,” who, with his companions Tom, Carl, and Margaret may be looking for a meteorite, unless that’s just a metaphor for a cure for cancer (‘Carl believes given enough space anything can happen.’). Is Hal the same Hal in “Samarra” who shows up in a strange town with the narrator, who insinuate themselves among the locals? ‘Hal got the job and I started the play-acting group.’
Samarra, where in an ancient Mesopotamian tale a merchant encounters Death in the marketplace. Or is this something akin to pareidolia, seeing animal faces in clouds and whatnot? Who is Hal? Who is the narrator?
But in the next piece, “Sedona,” the narrator is accompanied by Marie as they blow into another town, again as if making a getaway, one step ahead of the law. It’s another religious experience in the middle of the Arizona town. ‘It made me think of baptism right there in the middle of the street.’ Buddha, Jesus, Quan Yin in the scent of sandalwood incense. ‘The joker in me wanted to say, Where’s Elvis, but I held my tongue for once.’
“Redland” is another in which this inclination to escape, the kind of free-floating impulse we feel in dreams with no specific reason behind it, features like an unspoken plot point. It’s Florida again (a native New Yorker, Dellarocca has lived and worked in south Florida for years). ‘There were woodpeckers having a field day out there.’ An ill-tempered, unpredictable boyfriend seems to be leaning on, oppressing his companions, Ludie, Grace, and even the narrator. ‘He was the kind of guy who believed in things.’ We all know the type, vague though it sounds. “Redland” ends: ‘Grace said, Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ They scram!
“I Should Have Left Pieces of Myself in the Walls” is another that involves fleeing, leaving the past behind. “In the film, a woman who spent most of her life moving from one town to another” has the habit of stuffing little notes in the places she’s abandoning. It makes the narrator wistful. ‘I wish I thought to leave a note in each of the houses I’ve lived in: a line or two from Stanger from a Strange Land….’
“Fame Dream,” “Waves Dream,” “The Dancing Plague” (‘I dreamed my grandmother was possessed with fever. Watched her twist into shapes with my dream’s eye.’) all shine the spotlight on the dream logic that drives (“drives”? Maybe more like “floats”) Lenny Dellarocca’s beguiling prose poems, all of them densely worded, single-paragraph narratives in the voice of this nebulous narrator who carries us across the universe. Who is this narrator? Does it matter? It’s like the omniscient voiceover in a movie that we can’t really visualize but trust nevertheless as it guides us through the dream.
‘How we feel about ourselves in the world is the wrong question,’ a museum docent tells his patrons at the beginning of “Outsiders.” The narrator, forever a skeptic, listens with thinning patience. and in the middle of the docent’s spiel he accidentally farts loudly. ‘And once again I have made a spectacle of myself,’ he concludes. ‘Once again, I matter.’
Once again, anything can happen. And it does.