Lucifer at the Starlite
Poems
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
A lyrically intense fifth collection from “one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets” (San Diego Union-Tribune).
With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected joy. Whether looking outward to events on the world stage—the war in Iraq, the 2004 Asian tsunami—or inward at struggles with the self, these poems aim at the heart and against the feeling that Lucifer may have already won the day.
from “Lucifer at the Starlite”
Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I’m worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who’s mostly mist, like methane rising
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Addonizio's gifts clarity, wicked wit and directness about sex remain on view in this, her fifth, collection, albeit with slightly diminishing returns. The Bay Area poet (What Is This Thing Called Love) extracts humor from headlines, takes comfort in the everyday and manages both to celebrate and to decry her complicated sexual self: "My Heart, "she says, is "That initial-scarred tabletop,/ that tiny little dance floor... That dressing room in the fetish boutique... That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams." Verse about modern love can push the bounds of the art, or of the unartful: poems try coyly "to say things/ disallowed from serious poetry/ and employ instead the lexicon of porn spam." Such work can certainly entertain. Less happily, poems based on fairy tales land too close to their older model, Anne Sexton, and poems about public catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami of 2004, the Iraq war) end up neither funny nor seriously powerful. Some of Addonizio's best poems ought to be popular a counterpart, as it were, to chick lit fiction ("I lost you like that grape jawbreaker/ I'd saved for last") and far better technically than many kindred poets. Fans of Addonizio's prior books will find much to like, but newcomers might do better with earlier volumes.
