Notes From Your BooksellerWe can’t stop reading the poem from which the book’s title originates. “Small Talk” is precise in its language and, through some key words, dropped in like breadcrumbs on a trail, brings us to the heart of the message. No spoiler alerts here. Addonizio’s poems create moments that you will remember, and often realize are all too familiar. Her poems are like the first beverage of the day — pick the beverage depending on the time you wake up.
A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world.
Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.
Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.
Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar.
A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, "if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming."
