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EXIT OPERA
September, 2024
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National Book Award finalist Addonizio (Now We're Getting Somewhere) uses frank, wittily caustic language to ask what life means and how to ride out its anxieties; she knows exactly how absurd our existence is, and she's not backing down...Addonizio frames her life as an opera ("maybe an aria sung by a feral kitten"), and as she contemplates the curtain (see her title), she turns in a gusty, bravura performance."
VERDICT A thoroughly energizing look at life’s big questions that starts on a high note and never stops.
-Library Journal, Starred Review
“ Several moments in these poems suggest a universal despair and loneliness that feels in keeping with the present moment, but Addonizio’s incredible comedic timing and brilliance at subverting the reader’s expectations ensures the mood is never too dark for long. These poems are brilliant reflections from the high priestess of the confessional.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW
“…another knockout collection…in Addonizio's treatment, subjects as various as misogyny, climate change, hotel bars, literary critics, convalescence, orgasms and John Keats become heartbreaking, gut-busting, shattering.” -SHELF AWARENESS
“Addonizio is brash and tender, pissed off and funny, well armored and wounded. Emotions, bravado, and empathy run high in her award-garnering poetry and novels, and she now taps into the wellsprings of her creativity in this rollicking and wrenching memoir-in-essays. . . . Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio, a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham, delivers shock and awe, humor and pathos with panache.”
“Kim Addonizio’s voice lifts from the page, alive and biting―unleashing wit with a ruthless observation.”
“Kim Addonizio’s Mortal Trash is a brash, irreverent look at the physical and emotional refuse produced in our self-absorbed culture.”
POETRY
“Only Kim Addonizio could mix Greek myths with psychopharmacology, Dante with a pinging iPhone, heartbreak with plastic pollution, and create a rare cocktail of wit and desire..”
“In an eclectic collection…Addonizio shrewdly and gracefully blends tragedy and humor.”
“National Book Award finalist Addonizio…fills her latest collection not with trash but with edgy free verse (along with several sonnets) about contemporary situations of love and loss shot through with allusions to classic poets.”
“I don’t just hear the blues in these poems. I see the blues in these poems. I see myself in these poems.”
“One of America’s best poets…With casual anguish, resilience, and unrelenting beauty, Kim Addonizio writes a though human survival in the raw requires a moral refutation of existential melancholy.”
“Peerless poetry…reliably remarkable clarity, edge, and emotion.”
“It is with warm anticipation that I greet a new book by Kim Addonizio…Her fifth collection…is as dark and sardonic as the title suggests.”
“Addonizio doesn’t do pretty; beneath her considerable wit is a wickedly sharp edge…A winner. ”
“Lucifer at the Starlite is one of the best reasons to read poetry today.”
“… should help her attract the wide audience she explicitly invites.”
“Addonizio’s finely crafted and irreverent poems are timeless in their inquiries into love and mortality, rife with mystery and ambivalence, and achingly eloquent in their study of the conflictful union of body and soul. ”
“The sheer pleasure these poems make of language, both in turns of phrase and in swathes of extended metaphor, animates and makes convincing what could become simply fashionable cynicism and street-smart bravado.”
“Kim Addonizio’s poems are stark mirrors of self-examination, and she looks into them without blinking.”
“Told in the cracked, smoky voice of someone who has loved and lost a lot and has come out the stronger for it these poems…crackle with energy yet do not betray the slightest slackening of craft.”
“[A] well-paced, readable book; Addonizio has a natural gift for pacing. She also achieves a novelistic detachment rare for poets. She refuses to romanticize her characters but also never loses sympathy with their humanity.”
“One of the wonderful things about Jimmy & Rita is that Kim Addonizio never imposes herself in any way, so the poems sing themselves into us….I think of them and there is a sense of sadness within me. Yet I think of what Addonizio has accomplished and I feel joy.”
“…a gritty sequence of deeply moving narrative poems… Addonizio…writes in gritty and graphic detail, but she makes us care about this special pair of lovers.”
“Kim Addonizio’s work is distinguished by two of the rarest qualities in American poetry: a sense of dramatic life on the page and a sense of class consciousness… a book that streams with the fragmented unity, pace and visceral immediacy of a film.”
NONFiction
“An unrelenting, authentic, literary midnight confession.”
“It would be easy to compare Kim Addonizio’s memoir Bukowski in a Sundress with the writings of Anne Lamott or the humor of Amy Schumer, or to match her to, as she writes, “ ‘Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu,’ or possibly ‘Emily Dickinson with a strap-on’ “ but that would not do justice to Addonizio and her quirky, irreverent, incredibly funny writing.”
FICTION
“…[a] lovely short story collection.”
“…so tight and polished that it’s hard to believe that this is only Addonizio’s second collection. ”
“searingly beautiful, evocative, and surprising….a collection in the best tradition of Robert Coover and Angela Carter.”
“Poet Addonizio brings her hip, dark sensibility to a second collection of short fiction.”
“The Palace of Illusions is a collection of many delights, its mirrors reflecting and magnifying the contradictions and conflicts inherent in human experience.”
“Kim Addonizio writes like Lucinda Williams sings, with hard-earned grit and grace about the heart’s longing for love and redemption…one of the finest American novels I’ve read in some time.”
“Even during the harshest times, the beauty of Addonizio’s language binds the reader to a story that unfolds in the shadows of Denis Johnson’s and Charles Bukowski’s works…Her characters’ desperate lives are rendered with striking delicacy.”
“Addonizio creates mesmerizing characters… As she tells this bluesy tale of bad luck and addiction, sleazy hotels and sexual violence, biblical rain and sudden reprieves, Addonizio zeroes in on the power of love and life’s insistence. ”
“Little Beauties encases a real, thumping heart between the pages. Let the lovefest begin.”
“A wonderfully optimistic, quirky testament to the power of chance encounters.”
“Like Anne Lamott...Addonizio seems to sense how to pull back from sentimentality, be it with humor, honesty or clarity of vision.”
“I found myself rooting for them — a real trick to pull off — rooting for each, especially that new baby...”
“These are voices that will continue to resonate long after you’ve read the last page of the book.”
“Little Beauties tackles tough subjects…with unflinching clarity, lyricism and humor.”
“The brutal walks alongside the transcendent in nearly all of Addonizio’s stories, giving them a depth and range that is truly impressive, especially in their brevity. Most of these stories are roughly six or seven pages long, some no more than a few paragraphs, but they are instantly gripping. As a collection, they cross a wide field as well, and in stories like “The Gift” and “A Brief History of Condoms,” Addonizio uses her agility to bring wit and humor into the equation. Added together, these stories display a woman who is in full awareness and who maintains a tight control on her perceptions.”
Craft Books & Anthologies
“Addonizio…is anything but ordinary…Here, she offers a way in for new poets struggling to unfold the images and phrases suggests numerous instructive and fun exercise to trigger ideas for poetry.”
“... rigorous, generous, in love with the art of poetry…and maybe it couldn’t have been written by anyone but Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, two passionate poets.”
“… an impassioned exploration of poetry writing that addresses subject matter, craft, and the writing life…. a terrific section of writing exercises…This is a fine book indeed.”
“…head and shoulders above the rest… the authors offer everything a poet needs.”
“An intelligent, lucid conversation―between the authors and between them and us.”—Gerald Stern”