Mortal Trash
Poems
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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“Kim Addonizio’s voice lifts from the page, alive and biting—unleashing wit with a ruthless observation.”—San Francisco Book Review
Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas crèches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.
From “Scrapbook”:
We believe in the one-ton rose
and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues
assume you understand
not much, and try to be alive, just as we do,
and that it may be helpful to hold the hand
of someone as lost as you.
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The prolific Addonizio (Lucifer at the Starlite) maintains her practice of brash and boozy musings where the minor catastrophes of love, lust, and aging mingle with the grander horrors of terrorism and global warming. In a lament on modern malaise ironically titled "Divine," Addonizio upbraids her own complacency. "You lived on grapes and antidepressants," she writes, "watched the DVDs that dropped/ from the DVD tree." Her combination of wit and jaded romanticism spawns wry declarations: "I know we've just met and everything/ but I'd really like to fall apart on you now." Addonizio adeptly draws themes out into absurdity in such instructional poems as "Introduction to Poetry," in which would-be poets are asked to choose what they would save in a house fire: their grandmother or their "best and truest poem." With vivid descriptions, Addonizio summons the sea as an object of existential fretting, and in the city she observes "this slut of a river smear kisses all over/ east Manhattan." In a section of sonnets, repeating images and song lyrics intermingle with changing seasons as the poet ponders destructive patterns of death, love, and alcoholism and the chord of annihilation that connects them. In an eclectic collection where it is perfectly natural for a poem to begin "I'm rearranging the taxidermied rabbit heads," Addonizio shrewdly and gracefully blends tragedy and humor.
