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Wild Nights
America's Kim Addonizio has been called 'one of the nation's most provocative and edgy poets'. Her poetry is renowned both for its gritty, street-wise narrators and for a wicked sense of wit. With passion, precision and irreverent honesty, her poems explore life's dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, joy and suffering, exposing raw emotions often only visible when truly confronting ourselves - jealousy, self-pity, fear, lust.
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 2015
About the author
Kim Addonizio
66 books626 followersAuthor of several poetry collections including Tell Me, a National Book Award Finalist. My Black Angel is a book of blues poems with woodcuts by Charles D. Jones, from SFA Press. The Palace of Illusions is a story collection from Counterpoint/Soft Skull. A New & Selected, Wild Nights, is out in the UK from Bloodaxe Books.
2016 publications: Mortal Trash, new poems, from W.W. Norton, awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize. A memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, from Penguin.
Two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within.
First novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster and chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, second novel, released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.
A new word/music CD, "My Black Angel, "is a collaboration with several musicians and contains all the poems in the book of that name. That and an earlier word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.com. There's an earlier book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,, co-edited with Cheryl Dumesnil.
I teach poetry workshops at conferences and online through my web site. I also play blues harmonica, and I'm learning jazz flute. Music is a good place to focus when I'm in a writing slump.
2016 publications: Mortal Trash, new poems, from W.W. Norton, awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize. A memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, from Penguin.
Two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within.
First novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster and chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, second novel, released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.
A new word/music CD, "My Black Angel, "is a collaboration with several musicians and contains all the poems in the book of that name. That and an earlier word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.com. There's an earlier book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,, co-edited with Cheryl Dumesnil.
I teach poetry workshops at conferences and online through my web site. I also play blues harmonica, and I'm learning jazz flute. Music is a good place to focus when I'm in a writing slump.
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December 15, 2024
There is a maelstrom of emotions swirling through Kim Addonizio’s Wild Nights. This aptly titled collection selected from her poetry collections published between 1994 and 2015 often reads like a raucous evening teetering on the edge of one shot too many. At other times it feels like an ache you can’t stop fussing with. Yet at all times these poems are grabbing life by the throat across a boozed soaked musicality of prose while keeping an eye on death, always lurking in the corner. ‘Into every life a little ax must fall,’ Addonizio writes, but it is a life lived with the intensity on high of love, drink and debauchery, ‘knowing it would end and not caring.’ Gritty yet gorgeous by turns both edgy and emotional and delivered with a sublime rawness rotating between primal screams and tender vulnerability, Wild Nights is indeed a wild ride. And at the center of it all is love.
“What Do Women Want?”
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
This has been a collection I return to again and again over the years, and it always hits the right notes when needed. ‘This is me, depressed out of my mind, / frailing the banjo, spilling red wine,’ writes Kim Addonizio and while this is a collection that seems to strike best when caught in that tension of sorrow and sloppy joy that seems to arise when frollicking amongst the rocks upon the proverbial bottom, it is never a bad choice to pull off the shelf. Addonizio’s poetry was once described by a poetry award judge as “Bukowski in a sundress.” While aimed to bruise, she instead embraced the description (it is even the title of her memoir) which is in keeping with the spirit of her poetry as something that takes hits but stands strong while delivering blows back. ‘Maybe one day, when Bukowski's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained pants,"’ Addonizio jokes in Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life ‘and then I hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.’ There is a fire to her works that can be often bleak yet humorous at the same time while always conscious of our mortality and the hours of our lives quickly slipping away. ‘What happened, happened once,’ she writes in Stolen Moments, but even in this awareness of decay and death she embraces the fact that we can still find sweetness remembering ‘ we still had hours’ and not letting them be wasted.
First Poem for You
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
There is a real intimacy at work in these poems, something she finds vital to the heart of poetry itself. In her essays contained in The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she tells us that ‘poetry is an intimate act,’ and one you should go into—like with a lover—with honesty and vulnerability
Addonizio doesn’t shy away from the darkness of life but she also doesn’t hide anything either and intimate moments of love, lust, longing and losing oneself in the bottles of either booze or pills (or both) come trippingly across the collection. There’s a rather musical feel to it, along with a few references to music itself and in an interview with Eastern Willow Magazine, Addonizio admits that musicians are her biggest poetic inspirations. She cites Joni Mitchell in particular saying ‘All my poems are about my search for love, which doesn’t seem to cease—so many of her songs are about that struggle with finding love or negotiating love.’ Though it is the spirit of the blues she most hopes to harness in her own work.
Beyond the musicality of her language, she also crafts some rather striking images. Of love she writes of a man who can ‘raise it in me / like a dead girl winched up from a river’. Imagery siphoned from horror films also permeates the collection, such as the poem The Night of the Living Dead where the brainless hordes are less frightening than the living who can hate you or how she builds an eerie tone through descriptions of the sky in Scary Movies:
Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon
There is a rather playful humor to her works as well, albeit a sort of rather dark comedy and gallows humor. Though it often comes along with some rather profound vulnerability and soul-searching. In the poem Seasonal Affective Disorder she quips
‘Whoever came up with the acronym must have been happy
to think of everyone in winter walking around
saying 'I have SAD' instead of This time of year,
when the light leaves early and intimations of colder
hours settle over the houses like the great oppressive
oily scutes of a dragon's belly, I feel, I don't know,
a sense of ennui, a listlessness or lassitude
but more than that a definite undertow of dread
spreading over the waters of my already not-
exactly-sunny-to-begin-with-soul’
Her poems can be rather gleefully crass and she is self-aware of this in a way that is rather charming. The poem Fuck, for instance, is rather playful with this awareness and unapologetic brashness for which she employes a rather caustic lexicon: ‘There are people who will tell you / that using the word fuck in a poem / indicates a serious lapse / of taste, or imagination, // or both. It's vulgar, / indecorous, an obscenity /that crashes down like an anvil,’ she writes before dismissing the criticisms with a crisp rebuttal that ‘if you wouldn't say / anything but Mercy or Oh my / or Land sakes, well then / I don't want to know you anyway / and I don't give a fuck what you think.’ Its punk as fuck, especially in the way both Addonizio and punk have a shared origin in the blues and its just rather fun (and sometimes rhymes in a way that feels very lyrical). I’ve also always been curious if that poem was in response to criticisms over poems such as this one:
Prosody Pathétique
Trochees tear your heart to tatters.
Lovers leave you broken, battered.
Fuck you, fuck off: spondees. So what.
Get high. Drop dead. Who cares. Life sucks.
Dactyls are you getting boozed in your underwear,
thinking of someone who used to be there.
These are iambs: Dolor. Despair.
And going on and on about your pain,
and sleeping pills, and dark and heavy rain.
Now for the anapests: in the end, you're alone.
In the bag, in the dark; in a terrible rut.
With a smirk, in a wink, the wolves tear you apart.
But not all is dark, edgy fun as Addonizio often aims right for the heart and hits all the feels with a rather warm tenderness—the sort that resonates like warming your hands over the stove in a chilled room to try and push back the gloom. Returning to the poem Fuck, she eventually turns the rather snarky piece into something very tender, ending the poem writing ‘ Fuck me, I say to the one / whose lovely body I want close, / and as we fuck I know it's holy, / a psalm, a hymn, a hammer / ringing down on an anvil, / forging a whole new world.’ I love the return of the anvil image here. Honestly, this collection is shot through with an embrace of love, the way it is ‘merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.’ There are poems of tenderness with lovers but the ones that hit hardest for me are those about her daughter. Such as the poem about carrying her daughter to bed and reflecting that ‘someone once carried the weight of my life.’ Or the poem for her daughter at age 15:
Mermaid Song
Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself
upside down across the sofa, reading,
one hand idly sunk into a bowl
of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on.
I think they are growing gills, swimming
up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl,
my slim miracle, they multiply.
In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face
is the bright lure I look for, love's hook
piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.
From punchy to the punch of emotions, Wild Nights is quite a gorgeous storm of darkness and light swirling about. Addonizio is certainly a unique and powerful voice and her poems are always a comfort especially in hard times. A gorgeous musicality drives this collection that, even amidst all the woes and weariness, champions love as the center of our existence and the sweetness that makes our brief, finite lives worth having suffered through. A lovely collection.
4.5/5
Prayer
Sometimes, when we’re lying after love,
I look at you and see your body’s future
of lying beneath the earth; putting the heel
of my hand against your rib I feel how faint
and far away the heartbeat is. I rest
my cheek against your left nipple and listen
to the surge of blood, seeing your life splashed out,
filmy water hurled from a pot
onto dry grass. And I want to be pressed
deep into the bed and covered over,
the way a seed is pressed into a hole,
the dirt tramped down with a trowel.
I want to be a failed seed, the kind
that doesn’t grow, that doesn’t know it’s meant to.
I want to lie here without moving, lifeless
as an animal that’s slaughtered, its blood smeared
on a doorpost, I want death to take me if it
has to, to spare you, I want it to pass over.
“What Do Women Want?”
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
This has been a collection I return to again and again over the years, and it always hits the right notes when needed. ‘This is me, depressed out of my mind, / frailing the banjo, spilling red wine,’ writes Kim Addonizio and while this is a collection that seems to strike best when caught in that tension of sorrow and sloppy joy that seems to arise when frollicking amongst the rocks upon the proverbial bottom, it is never a bad choice to pull off the shelf. Addonizio’s poetry was once described by a poetry award judge as “Bukowski in a sundress.” While aimed to bruise, she instead embraced the description (it is even the title of her memoir) which is in keeping with the spirit of her poetry as something that takes hits but stands strong while delivering blows back. ‘Maybe one day, when Bukowski's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained pants,"’ Addonizio jokes in Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life ‘and then I hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.’ There is a fire to her works that can be often bleak yet humorous at the same time while always conscious of our mortality and the hours of our lives quickly slipping away. ‘What happened, happened once,’ she writes in Stolen Moments, but even in this awareness of decay and death she embraces the fact that we can still find sweetness remembering ‘ we still had hours’ and not letting them be wasted.
First Poem for You
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
There is a real intimacy at work in these poems, something she finds vital to the heart of poetry itself. In her essays contained in The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she tells us that ‘poetry is an intimate act,’ and one you should go into—like with a lover—with honesty and vulnerability
‘[Poetry is] about bringing forth something that’s inside you—whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It’s about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others—not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.’
Addonizio doesn’t shy away from the darkness of life but she also doesn’t hide anything either and intimate moments of love, lust, longing and losing oneself in the bottles of either booze or pills (or both) come trippingly across the collection. There’s a rather musical feel to it, along with a few references to music itself and in an interview with Eastern Willow Magazine, Addonizio admits that musicians are her biggest poetic inspirations. She cites Joni Mitchell in particular saying ‘All my poems are about my search for love, which doesn’t seem to cease—so many of her songs are about that struggle with finding love or negotiating love.’ Though it is the spirit of the blues she most hopes to harness in her own work.
‘The language of the blues hits on those primal subjects—love and loss and getting through hard times. There’s also a subversive element that Gary Lilley was talking about in class, the way those songs are about struggle. So you can take it to the political level, but it is also personal. The blues singer is a singular figure, you know, singing about his or her own sorrow, but singing about it for everybody. That’s what I like. The intimacy draws me in—which is something I feel in lyrical poetry too, one consciousness speaking to another about what is true for them.’
Beyond the musicality of her language, she also crafts some rather striking images. Of love she writes of a man who can ‘raise it in me / like a dead girl winched up from a river’. Imagery siphoned from horror films also permeates the collection, such as the poem The Night of the Living Dead where the brainless hordes are less frightening than the living who can hate you or how she builds an eerie tone through descriptions of the sky in Scary Movies:
Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon
There is a rather playful humor to her works as well, albeit a sort of rather dark comedy and gallows humor. Though it often comes along with some rather profound vulnerability and soul-searching. In the poem Seasonal Affective Disorder she quips
‘Whoever came up with the acronym must have been happy
to think of everyone in winter walking around
saying 'I have SAD' instead of This time of year,
when the light leaves early and intimations of colder
hours settle over the houses like the great oppressive
oily scutes of a dragon's belly, I feel, I don't know,
a sense of ennui, a listlessness or lassitude
but more than that a definite undertow of dread
spreading over the waters of my already not-
exactly-sunny-to-begin-with-soul’
Her poems can be rather gleefully crass and she is self-aware of this in a way that is rather charming. The poem Fuck, for instance, is rather playful with this awareness and unapologetic brashness for which she employes a rather caustic lexicon: ‘There are people who will tell you / that using the word fuck in a poem / indicates a serious lapse / of taste, or imagination, // or both. It's vulgar, / indecorous, an obscenity /that crashes down like an anvil,’ she writes before dismissing the criticisms with a crisp rebuttal that ‘if you wouldn't say / anything but Mercy or Oh my / or Land sakes, well then / I don't want to know you anyway / and I don't give a fuck what you think.’ Its punk as fuck, especially in the way both Addonizio and punk have a shared origin in the blues and its just rather fun (and sometimes rhymes in a way that feels very lyrical). I’ve also always been curious if that poem was in response to criticisms over poems such as this one:
Prosody Pathétique
Trochees tear your heart to tatters.
Lovers leave you broken, battered.
Fuck you, fuck off: spondees. So what.
Get high. Drop dead. Who cares. Life sucks.
Dactyls are you getting boozed in your underwear,
thinking of someone who used to be there.
These are iambs: Dolor. Despair.
And going on and on about your pain,
and sleeping pills, and dark and heavy rain.
Now for the anapests: in the end, you're alone.
In the bag, in the dark; in a terrible rut.
With a smirk, in a wink, the wolves tear you apart.
But not all is dark, edgy fun as Addonizio often aims right for the heart and hits all the feels with a rather warm tenderness—the sort that resonates like warming your hands over the stove in a chilled room to try and push back the gloom. Returning to the poem Fuck, she eventually turns the rather snarky piece into something very tender, ending the poem writing ‘ Fuck me, I say to the one / whose lovely body I want close, / and as we fuck I know it's holy, / a psalm, a hymn, a hammer / ringing down on an anvil, / forging a whole new world.’ I love the return of the anvil image here. Honestly, this collection is shot through with an embrace of love, the way it is ‘merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.’ There are poems of tenderness with lovers but the ones that hit hardest for me are those about her daughter. Such as the poem about carrying her daughter to bed and reflecting that ‘someone once carried the weight of my life.’ Or the poem for her daughter at age 15:
Mermaid Song
Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself
upside down across the sofa, reading,
one hand idly sunk into a bowl
of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on.
I think they are growing gills, swimming
up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl,
my slim miracle, they multiply.
In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face
is the bright lure I look for, love's hook
piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.
From punchy to the punch of emotions, Wild Nights is quite a gorgeous storm of darkness and light swirling about. Addonizio is certainly a unique and powerful voice and her poems are always a comfort especially in hard times. A gorgeous musicality drives this collection that, even amidst all the woes and weariness, champions love as the center of our existence and the sweetness that makes our brief, finite lives worth having suffered through. A lovely collection.
4.5/5
Prayer
Sometimes, when we’re lying after love,
I look at you and see your body’s future
of lying beneath the earth; putting the heel
of my hand against your rib I feel how faint
and far away the heartbeat is. I rest
my cheek against your left nipple and listen
to the surge of blood, seeing your life splashed out,
filmy water hurled from a pot
onto dry grass. And I want to be pressed
deep into the bed and covered over,
the way a seed is pressed into a hole,
the dirt tramped down with a trowel.
I want to be a failed seed, the kind
that doesn’t grow, that doesn’t know it’s meant to.
I want to lie here without moving, lifeless
as an animal that’s slaughtered, its blood smeared
on a doorpost, I want death to take me if it
has to, to spare you, I want it to pass over.
December 12, 2017
I've recently reread the Addonizio collections I already owned, and then became aware of this one late last year. It contains selections from several previous collections as well as a few new poems. Always irreverent. Always edgy. Quite a few poems about death, my favorite subject. I never tire of reading and rereading her work.
April 5, 2018
This is my first time reading Kim Addonizio's poems. They are very gritty, edgy, personal, and honest. My favourite poems: Seasonal Affective Disorder, Party, The Givens, Last Lights, Florida, Sleep Stage, Glass, and Postmodern Romance: Internet Dating.
Some excerpts that were especially memorable for me:
"I know we've just met and everything
but I'd really like to fall apart on you now"
(Party)
"I think we have chemistry. I really need a lab partner.
Could I just, you know, let my molecules separate
while you keep an eye on the burner? The flame's kind of fickle.
Here's hoping it doesn't go out."
(Party)
"Don’t you hate the holidays?
All that giving. All those wind-up
crèches, those fake silver icicles.
If you had a real one you could skewer
the big cursed heart of your undead love.
Instead you have a silver noodle
with which you must flay yourself. "
(Divine)
"I’m thinking of dating trees next.
We could just stand around all night together.
We could stand each other.
I’d murmur, they’d rustle, the wind
would, like, do its wind thing,
without speaking. I hate speech."
(Postmodern Romance: Internet Dating)
"Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him."
(Glass)
Some excerpts that were especially memorable for me:
"I know we've just met and everything
but I'd really like to fall apart on you now"
(Party)
"I think we have chemistry. I really need a lab partner.
Could I just, you know, let my molecules separate
while you keep an eye on the burner? The flame's kind of fickle.
Here's hoping it doesn't go out."
(Party)
"Don’t you hate the holidays?
All that giving. All those wind-up
crèches, those fake silver icicles.
If you had a real one you could skewer
the big cursed heart of your undead love.
Instead you have a silver noodle
with which you must flay yourself. "
(Divine)
"I’m thinking of dating trees next.
We could just stand around all night together.
We could stand each other.
I’d murmur, they’d rustle, the wind
would, like, do its wind thing,
without speaking. I hate speech."
(Postmodern Romance: Internet Dating)
"Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him."
(Glass)
April 16, 2016
I love it when I discover a new poet - Addonizio is amazing - honest, raw at times,visceral even and immensely moving. Favourite poems included: Divine, Postmodern Romance: Internet Dating, Florida, Party, The Call, First Poem for You, The Divorcee and Gin, Fuck, and For You. Definitely want to read more.
June 26, 2024
Not much to say about this one except that I couldn't relate to much of it so for me personally it was relatively middle of the road. That's just me tho.
July 24, 2025
Poetry for bitches (I mean this in the most endearing way ever!) saying all the things we wish we were saying
i am, once again, gonna be revisiting a lot, a lot
i am, once again, gonna be revisiting a lot, a lot
September 24, 2020
I did't find these poems edgy or provocative as it says in the blurb but perhaps that's just me. I did however find them honest, fierce, thoughtful, lyrical, sometimes playful, sometimes tender but always full of passion for both language and the mad, frazzled sufferings and joys we call living. What more could one ask for? Adonizzio is one of the good guys/gals, totally unpretentious and endlessly engaging. I'll be going back to this often.
January 6, 2016
Wow--Addonizio is amazing. Racy and edgy, but also well-crafted and imagistically stunning.
June 15, 2019
I would love to be able to say I don't like any poets of the last fifty years, but then I remember how much I utterly adored Wislawa Szymborska. I can't say I hate autobiographical poetry, either, because how is Byron's poetry not about himself? I just, I just, really can't get on with this method that seems to be prevalent in modern poets of using the poetry as a confessional box. And it's not even mediated confession, there's no grille or priest or penance involved, it's literally just graffiti-ing up the inside of the confessional box.
I understand that pain and suffering, particularly the sort engendered by substance abuse and rash sexual choices, can be a fertile ground for poetry. I don't understand why it seems to be the only ground considered, why there isn't room for poetry of the cool and collected, of the people who have their fucking shit together, but who are so because they Put In The Work. The Work itself can be poetic. The Work can be full of rage and pain. But it's the cap on it.
At the end of the day, Addonizio et al remind me too much of my working life, where patients come and vent at me like I'm some kind of emotion-absorbing robot who can take on everything they vomit up without it touching me, and that's their solution, instead of doing something for themselves. And that's why I don't like it.
To be clear I did get something from this. There were bits and lines that resonated and were even beautiful. But what I've found from reading poets in the round, as it were, rather than in dribs and drabs, is that I can't help but make a judgement that incorporates the whole. So if the whole is lacking, so is the overall judgement.
Last Lights:
the knowledge
that the earth is a great spheroid head
with an oblate headache that hurricane swirl
Name That Means Holy In Greek:
He said it meant wow
which is the best word I know
for the unutterable sublime.
The Givens:
Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames.
The Sound:
It's like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it stops.
It's shy, it's barely there. It never stops.
For Desire:
To hell with the saints, with the martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
Like ... endurance ... might have been ... useful?
News:
These were little victories
over a sullen god - the one who hunkers down
and rocks back and forth, muttering
that there's no reason to go on
lifting the stone of today
only to watch it roll down into tomorrow.
Poems I liked: Seasonal Affective Disorder; Party (mainly because it reminded me of my friend, and she agreed); Fuck; The Matter.
I understand that pain and suffering, particularly the sort engendered by substance abuse and rash sexual choices, can be a fertile ground for poetry. I don't understand why it seems to be the only ground considered, why there isn't room for poetry of the cool and collected, of the people who have their fucking shit together, but who are so because they Put In The Work. The Work itself can be poetic. The Work can be full of rage and pain. But it's the cap on it.
At the end of the day, Addonizio et al remind me too much of my working life, where patients come and vent at me like I'm some kind of emotion-absorbing robot who can take on everything they vomit up without it touching me, and that's their solution, instead of doing something for themselves. And that's why I don't like it.
To be clear I did get something from this. There were bits and lines that resonated and were even beautiful. But what I've found from reading poets in the round, as it were, rather than in dribs and drabs, is that I can't help but make a judgement that incorporates the whole. So if the whole is lacking, so is the overall judgement.
Last Lights:
the knowledge
that the earth is a great spheroid head
with an oblate headache that hurricane swirl
Name That Means Holy In Greek:
He said it meant wow
which is the best word I know
for the unutterable sublime.
The Givens:
Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames.
The Sound:
It's like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it stops.
It's shy, it's barely there. It never stops.
For Desire:
To hell with the saints, with the martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
Like ... endurance ... might have been ... useful?
News:
These were little victories
over a sullen god - the one who hunkers down
and rocks back and forth, muttering
that there's no reason to go on
lifting the stone of today
only to watch it roll down into tomorrow.
Poems I liked: Seasonal Affective Disorder; Party (mainly because it reminded me of my friend, and she agreed); Fuck; The Matter.
June 13, 2023
The Women
We turn sixteen. We cannabis
and Vicodin. We Dexadrine.
We stolen scarves and dresses
disordered in boys’ cars
and falling down on dance floors.
We waste years and wishes
and finally marry
or wait for a king who does dishes.
We curse bosses.
We birth give and bring forth
and feel our unworth.
We divorce. We grow
uncool. We carpool.
We forgive those who lie down against us.
We lose June. We lose July.
In August we look in mirrors and want to die.
We hot flash. We worry cash.
Night cream lotus jewel and bicep curl
we try. We buy high heels.
We lunch. We find lumps.
We put our feet in the stirrups
and our lives in the hands
and our hearts to the wheel
which grinds us,
and so
over time
we polish to a hard shine
and we divine.
We turn sixteen. We cannabis
and Vicodin. We Dexadrine.
We stolen scarves and dresses
disordered in boys’ cars
and falling down on dance floors.
We waste years and wishes
and finally marry
or wait for a king who does dishes.
We curse bosses.
We birth give and bring forth
and feel our unworth.
We divorce. We grow
uncool. We carpool.
We forgive those who lie down against us.
We lose June. We lose July.
In August we look in mirrors and want to die.
We hot flash. We worry cash.
Night cream lotus jewel and bicep curl
we try. We buy high heels.
We lunch. We find lumps.
We put our feet in the stirrups
and our lives in the hands
and our hearts to the wheel
which grinds us,
and so
over time
we polish to a hard shine
and we divine.
January 26, 2024
Gritty, unapologetic, visceral, explicit and edgy. This poetry collection by Kim Addonizio packs a punch. It reads like it stumbled out of a bar, drunk, a still-healing tattoo on its shoulder, exposed by a skimpy red dress. Or like a contraction, ungovernable and gut-ripping, screaming out life. Like Death whispering in your ear with a smile. Like a first kiss that tastes of electricity.
Jesus fucking Christ, I love these poems. Not all of them, of course. Like with any poetry anthology, it’s hit-and-miss. But the ones that do hit? They hit hard and cut deep. They’re badass. I feel rode hard and put away wet. In a good way.
Jesus fucking Christ, I love these poems. Not all of them, of course. Like with any poetry anthology, it’s hit-and-miss. But the ones that do hit? They hit hard and cut deep. They’re badass. I feel rode hard and put away wet. In a good way.
August 2, 2024
Picked this one up because I read that reading poetry is essential for writing poetry and I wanted to take that advice to heart :)
For that purpose this was a perfect fit. Not only is it a quite accessible read, in this collection there’s also a wide variety of styles, which I appreciated.
I often find myself using roughly the same line/stanza lengths and style, but each of Addonizio’s poems has a unique style to it. So for me, it was very educational to her employ all these different styles. I also learnt a lot from her opening lines, which are pretty strong most of the time.
The reason I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped it would is because, although I loved many lines, there were barely any poems that I loved as a whole (and many that I didn’t like). And that’s okay, because it taught me what I like and dislike in a poem (turns out I prefer my poems a little less raw and a little more coherent). But I was just disappointed because there were so many beautifully crafted lines that I wished there was at least one poem that I could fall in love with.
Despite that, there still were a few poems I appreciated as a whole, such as For You, Mermaid Song, The Promise, Tell Me & The Women, which pays homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool.
A few great lines:
⁃ Oh hell, here’s that dark wood again. (Divine)
⁃ I know we’ve just met and everything / but I’d really like to fall apart on you now. (Party)
⁃ Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames. (The Givens)
For that purpose this was a perfect fit. Not only is it a quite accessible read, in this collection there’s also a wide variety of styles, which I appreciated.
I often find myself using roughly the same line/stanza lengths and style, but each of Addonizio’s poems has a unique style to it. So for me, it was very educational to her employ all these different styles. I also learnt a lot from her opening lines, which are pretty strong most of the time.
The reason I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped it would is because, although I loved many lines, there were barely any poems that I loved as a whole (and many that I didn’t like). And that’s okay, because it taught me what I like and dislike in a poem (turns out I prefer my poems a little less raw and a little more coherent). But I was just disappointed because there were so many beautifully crafted lines that I wished there was at least one poem that I could fall in love with.
Despite that, there still were a few poems I appreciated as a whole, such as For You, Mermaid Song, The Promise, Tell Me & The Women, which pays homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool.
A few great lines:
⁃ Oh hell, here’s that dark wood again. (Divine)
⁃ I know we’ve just met and everything / but I’d really like to fall apart on you now. (Party)
⁃ Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames. (The Givens)
August 6, 2024
"I have seen the best/gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through/the sewage-filled streets. Whose/world this is I think I know."
I'm full of antibiotics. I don't know my body anymore. But that's not a review. So, I'll start again.
I'm probably not in the right headspace for Addonizio, I may never be in the right headspace and that's ok. That's the nice thing about poetry, it doesn't make demands of you. It doesn't even ask much of your time.
I lost track so many times in Addonizio's book. I didn't know where I was and I kept losing my bookmark. I kept falling asleep. The poems just didn't demand my attention.
I'm full of antibiotics. I don't know my body anymore. But that's not a review. So, I'll start again.
I'm probably not in the right headspace for Addonizio, I may never be in the right headspace and that's ok. That's the nice thing about poetry, it doesn't make demands of you. It doesn't even ask much of your time.
I lost track so many times in Addonizio's book. I didn't know where I was and I kept losing my bookmark. I kept falling asleep. The poems just didn't demand my attention.
April 2, 2025
3.4
A lot of love for the poems in The Philosopher’s Club, Tell Me & What is this Thing Called Love, but things took a turn for the tragic in Lucifer at the Starlite and My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits (most of which I couldn’t even get through).
Lucifer was giving heartbreak in a really tragic kind of way and My Black Angel was forced rhyme after forced rhyme. It felt like a bit. Kind of took away from the rest of the selection for me.
A lot of love for the poems in The Philosopher’s Club, Tell Me & What is this Thing Called Love, but things took a turn for the tragic in Lucifer at the Starlite and My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits (most of which I couldn’t even get through).
Lucifer was giving heartbreak in a really tragic kind of way and My Black Angel was forced rhyme after forced rhyme. It felt like a bit. Kind of took away from the rest of the selection for me.
January 25, 2025
This is a collection from several poetry books that Kim Addonizio has published over the years. The best poems here take up from a daily minor incident and deliver amazing prose-like observations of our time and life in general. Living in America, love and sex and a lot morbidit and personal stuff about herself and her family members.
November 22, 2025
A collection of sets of Kim Addonizio's poems: 1 new set, 5 previously published sets. I love her poetry. It's edgy, it's frank, it's honest. It's an insight into lives I'll never live, and an exploration of feelings universal to the human race.
I always end up highlighting something, if not the whole poem, then lines that hit me harder. More often than not it's the whole poem.
I always end up highlighting something, if not the whole poem, then lines that hit me harder. More often than not it's the whole poem.
March 18, 2019
My short blog on the collection:
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...
May 9, 2022
Really enjoyed this collection of Addonizio’s poetry taken from previously published collections. Highly recommend!
June 11, 2022
All of these poems make me nauseous with jealousy of how sensual & wild & WONDERFUL they are. I’m verging on boringly obsessed for anyone around me.
January 5, 2024
wow wow wow
March 25, 2025
Some poems are like a punch to the gut!
September 18, 2024
kim addonizio forever <3
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