Exit Opera
Poems
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A Library Journal Best Poetry Book of 2024
A new volume by acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio, whose work is known for its streetwise, unflinching explorations of love, lust, and mortality.
Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject—jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers—these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to “[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find” and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life. As she writes in “My Opera”:
The staging is difficult. Exploding stars
are involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,
a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar containing
a tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swells
that I am steering toward you in the dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The captivating latest from Addonizio (after Now We're Getting Somewhere) offers a catalog of real and imagined endings ("after a while, you want to give up/ and say kill me now") through which a blithe, if slightly intoxicated, voice endures: "I prefer to stay here saying many pointless things." Whether mocking her own desperation in a dive bar or fleabag motel ("I know my soul is small; it just wants a decent hotel room"), Addonizio is a master of the one-liner: "If you make a mistake, repeat it; that's what God did." Amid serious reasons for angst, she notes that her mother's ashes smell of the jar's former contents, raspberry jam. The personal is also cosmic: "you be a dead language; I'll be an extinct civilization." What Addonizio seems to hate most is sentimentality, though she acknowledges that a sense of loss is hard to shake. In a memory of Paris (visited once 30 years ago), vanished family members and literary figures merge in the living past: "Look at them, alive in this poem, holding their menus & about to disappear./ De Beauvoir weeps as Sartre's lowered in." Addonizio never disappoints.
