Kim Addonizio
978-1-324-02194-0
(2021, W.W. Norton )
$16. 96 pages, paper
Reviewed by Cheryl Passanisi
In the opening poem “Night in the Castle,” Addonizio contemplates “what to do about that scorpion twitching on the wall” and considers slamming it “with this book of terrible poetry // or just read aloud to it until it dies of a histrionic metaphor / bleeding out on the ancient stones in a five-octave aria.” Addonizio takes our hand on a tour of grave mistakes revisited, addictions indulged, and irretrievable loves summoned with her matrix of musicality and rhythm while employing her hallmark wit and unvarnished vision.
Early on, in “Black Hour Blues” she writes: “The elk’s black blood leaks from the roof rack / Black the prospects of the destitute sick. // Blackberries suppurate in the pie tin.” The weight of the elk on the car roof and the blood stains follows us throughout the book with blood as a recurrent theme.
The cover has one high heel on its side on the pavement dirty with grime or mud. I imagine the owner of the shoe, a Cinderella of sorts, escaping some catastrophe or biblical flood, limping along with one shoe. In “Small Talk” she says to a prospective lover: “How many self-important wounds do you have?” Then: “I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back. / Now we’re getting somewhere.” I imagine her limping away with one high heel, a preserved dignity and the bravery needed to make that turn.
The poems continue a highwire act and insist on an ethos that disrupts and unsettles expectations. In “Ghosted”: “Nothing is being named after me // A planet would be nice…or a star system.” “I’ve already disappeared // like a dead girl in a police procedural.” There is no false modesty or shrinking humility but a self-deprecating humor insistent on a need for acknowledgement.
In a sonnet “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”: “If you ever woke in your dress at 4 a.m. ever / closed your legs to someone you loved opened / them for someone you didn’t” as the speaker extends her pathos to an unknown woman hidden, crying in the next stall.
“All Hallows” is an elegiac poem of longing for those dear ones separated by rift or departed from the earth: “It’s the Night of the living Ex-Husbands / The souls are pouring out of Purgatory” and “My father wants a fresh beer, my mother some Fritos with a single / bourbon-and-Coke / My brother just wants to go fishing one more time.” In the same poem Addonizio writes: “Virginia Woolf is rising / from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons / nothing in her pockets but bread.” It induces a deep empathy to think of Woolf emerging from the river with soggy bread in her pockets as opposed to the rocks that weighed her down. Addonizio ends the poem: “You have to take out the stones” and “You have to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them / The moon weakening like a cheap flashlight while your heart blinks on.”
Her love affair with Keats is a tenderly transmitted lyric, gentle with grief and longing to set it right by going back in time and smuggling antibiotics into the early 19th century to effect a cure for TB to prevent the suffering and affliction that cut the poet’s life short.
“Guitar” is an homage to rock-n-roll: “Don’t break your guitar unless you happen to be a guitar god / in which case go ahead & smash it with impunity befitting a god.” She digs much deeper and astonishingly: “A guitar, like a heart, has a hole in it / It heaves out its music like a twerking volcano.” A “hole in the heart” indicates a pathology that disrupts the vital flow of blood. The guitar body resonates and pours music out of a hole; the comparison transcending the overt metaphor: the hole in the heart no longer a defect but portal heaving music “like a faucet leaking bluebells in a gutted house.” She offers a sense of redemption; we can turn our flaws into art/music.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1.
Cheryl Ann Passanisi was born and raised on the central coast of California and went to school at California State University, Long Beach, and University of California, San Francisco where she earned a master’s degree in Nursing. She lives on the San Francisco peninsula and works at a teaching hospital as a nurse practitioner. She is active in local community theater and opera chorus.
Kim Addonizio is a fiction writer, poet, and teacher. Her poetry collections include Tell Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, What Is This Thing Called Love, and Lucifer at the Starlite. She lives in Oakland, California.
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