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Kim Addonizio

@kimaddonizio

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poet etcetera. deeply ambivalent about social media & other stuff. indoor enthusiast.

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TUESDAY IN TEMPE—Poets Tracey Knapp (@twistier) and Kim Addonizio (@kimaddonizio) present their latest collections, SWERVE and EXIT OPERA.⁠
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🗓️ TUE, OCT 27 @ 7PM⁠
📍 CHANGING HANDS TEMPE⁠
🔥 FREE EVENT⁠
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🔗 RSVP at the link in our bio.⁠
⁠
ABOUT THE BOOKS:⁠
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Exit Opera:⁠
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"⁠
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Swerve:⁠
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.

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O’dark thirty selfie at SeaTac, bound for Berkeley to read with @kimaddonizio at @pegasusbooks. Tonight at 7, I’ll have these questions for her; what would you like to know? Bring it!

Exit Opera takes up time, mortality, love, and loss, and a reviewer wrote that you confront death without flinching but don’t let it have the final word. What does the newest work know that Tell Me couldn’t?

Critics praise “the consistency of Addonizio’s persona—wry and knowing,” yet the confessional label continues to be applied to your work, and that of many other poets. How much of that I is built, and what would you say to the reader who takes it for the whole woman?

The sacred and the profane drink at the same bar in your titles (thinking of Lucifer at the Starlite here). Do your poems pray—and to whom, once church is out of the question?

You made My Black Angel: Blues Poems & Portraits and cut two word-and-music albums. What does the blues know about repetition—pain sung until it turns pleasurable—and what can the lyric poem learn there?

“I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight.” What did it cost you to write desire that nakedly in 2000—and what do you know now that the poem didn’t know then?

The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius have taught a generation. After your decades in the classroom: what part of the art actually transfers—and what must you refuse to teach so the student finds their voice?

One of your poems ends with “listen I love you joy is coming”—consolation addressed to a stranger crying hysterically in a bathroom stall. Who was that poem for—and where does joy sit in work this famous for regarding pain?

You have poured lives into a verse novel (Jimmy & Rita), novels, stories, and a memoir-in-essays. What sends a story to the poem instead of the essay—and what did the essay let you say about yourself that thirty years of poems would not?

#desirelines #redhenpress #booktour #kimaddonizio #berkeley

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Exciting workshops are coming up! Reserve your seat for our poetry and prose workshops, taught by acclaimed authors and gifted teachers.

Diving Deep: A Writing Intensive on Poetry's Ability to Reveal and Heal with Subhaga Crystal Bacon
➡️ This Monday Night generative poetry workshop will engage participants in a six week intensive writing poems that reveal hidden truths about ourselves.

Speaking To & Listening To Our Bodies: A Poetry Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney
➡️ We will surprise ourselves with poems to & from the body—of love or anger or elegy or fear or gratitude, or whatever we discover while engaged in deep listening and writing.

Crafting the Cover Letter with Diane Goettel
➡️ Diane Goettel, Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press, reads thousands of cover letters every year--and she wants to help you get yours right.

The Swerve: Developing Your Poem with Kim Addonizio
➡️ In this workshop, we'll explore the interplay between narrative and lyric movement, looking at how to guide a poem from that initial inspiration into new territory.

Writing For Composers: A Crash Course with Todd Boss
➡️ In this 2-hour crash course, you’ll study texts, learn to read like a composer, gather tips for entering into a true collaboration, and set yourself up to create powerful custom texts that really sing.

#writingworkshops #poetryworkshops #zoomworkshops #creativewriting #literaryarts #hudsonvalley

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Thursday night, Berkeley. I get to read with @kimaddonizio.

Start with the line that strangers give each other in hard years — “listen I love you joy is coming” — from her poem “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall.”

I believed Kim when I first read it, and I believe her now. Desire Lines ends in a blast zone, tending a fire with my sons. She makes a good argument for living.

A Guggenheim, two NEA fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, a National Book Award finalist...the list goes on with Kim, who is absolutely nasty on the harmonica, and helped shepherd me onstage to sing for the very first time at @ptwriters.

When she learned a critic had called her “Bukowski in a sundress,” she took the insult for a title and wrote a memoir-in-essays under it. I know that move. My abuela had a word for women like us — sinvergüenza — and in Desire Lines I take it on as my own: “There is no shame in being shameless.”

Her latest collection is Exit Opera from @w.w.norton. Desire Lines is out now from @redhenpress in print and as an audiobook that I narrated.

Thursday, October 22, 7 p.m. @pegasusbooks downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. Free and open to the public.

#desirelines #memoir #redhenpress #booktour #writingcommunity

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I promise ❤️‍🩹 Today is pregnancy and infant loss remembrance day. I know firsthand how long and lonely the walk out of an OB office can be after there is no heartbeat. This poem is for anyone else who has also experienced it. After @kimaddonizio

#motherhood #poem #pregnancyloss

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“Millares Young brings a searching, generous, and unrelenting gaze to every subject she writes on, most of all herself.” —Melissa Febos

Next week! Join us at Pegasus Books Downtown on Thursday, October 22nd for a book launch celebration with author Kristen Millares Young, in conversation with poet and writer Kim Addonizio. @kristenmillares @kimaddonizio

We’ll be celebrating the release of Millares Young’s new memoir “Desire Lines”—a forensic investigation into the emotional topography of womanhood, from @redhenpress.

Free and open to the public. Books will be available for signing—see you there ✨

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sneaky peak 🫣 ahead of tomorrow's publication. a unique blend fantastic poems & shitty drawings ✨ no AI here! I promise, you can tell lol

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I love books about writing. I referenced and revisited so many of them while working on my second novel Headfirst. Below is an incomplete list of craft books that provided the foundation for how I think about language and the mechanics of writing.

How Fiction Works by James Wood: a classic for good reason

Body Work by Melissa Febos: bring the body onto the page

Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux: fiction writers, and all prose writers, read books from poets!

My Trade Is Mystery by Carl Phillips: gorgeous and necessary for any artist. Another poet providing enduring wisdom that crosses genres.

The Tin House Writer’s Notebook: every essay in both editions is a must. I’ve been reading these for 15 years, and I still learn something new each time. Special love goes to Dorothy Allison’s iconic essay about writing place in the first volume.

Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley: always good to revisit the basics and he does it so well

Wired for Story by Lisa Cron: great if you want to learn about writing propulsive, page-turning prose

Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell: read this, truly. It is a gift to anyone revising at any stage.

Not featured but equally beloved: Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses and “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Garielle Lutz and Finger Exercises for Poets by Dorianne Laux

#books #fiction #queerbooks

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FUTURE TENSE IS GOING ON TOUR AND I AM GOING TO HUG YOU SO HARD. ❤️

It’s official: Future Tense is hitting the road! I am SO excited to celebrate this book with so many brilliant poets, writers, readers, and friends across the country.
We’re going to be reading, talking, writing, crying and celebrating ❤️ It it would mean the world if you joined us💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻

📍 October 16 — Seattle, WA @thirdplacebooks
📍 October 17 — Portland, OR @literaryarts
📍 October 22 — Stratford, CT @obodoserendipitybooks
📍 October 24 — Delmar, NY @thewarblerbrewery
📍 October 26 — Brooklyn, NY @booksaremagicbk
📍 October 28 — Alexandria, VA @oldtownbooks
📍 November 11 — San Francisco, CA @greenapplebooks
📍 November 20 — Pasadena, CA @vromansbookstore

Swipe through for all the details, locations, dates, and the incredible writers joining me along the way.

Save this post, share it with a friend, sing it from the rooftops and COME SEE ME! I would LOVE to see you at one (or more!) of these events. ❤️

Wear Red. Bring a Friend. Write What Matters.
Future Tense is out October 13. Preorder today! 💃🏻

Also shout out to @randolphmfa (best program EVER) representing ❤️

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‘To the woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall’ ~ a poem by @kimaddonizio

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to a man you loved opened
them for one you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the car seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

#poetry #joy #hope #thesetimes

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FUTURE TENSE is going on tour. ❤️

I’m calling it The Wear Red Tour.

Wear a red dress or red lipstick. Red shoes or a red sweater. Red underwear if that’s your thing. Wear whatever makes you feel a little braver💃🏻

These won’t just be readings. We’ll laugh. We’ll probably cry. There will be an interactive writing moment at every stop because I want you to leave with more than a signed book—I want you to leave with new words and a new idea of what your capable of. To remind yourself of the person you’re becoming! ❤️

After years of writing these poems, I can’t believe I finally get to sit in the same room with you.

I can’t wait to see you very, very soon, friend.

❤️ Wear red.
📖 Bring a friend.
✍️ Write what matters.

Tickets for each city are in my bio, or coming so so soon!

What city will I see you in? Tag the friend you’re bringing with you. ❤️

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Acclaimed poet, fiction writer, and essayist Kim Addonizio shares the Five Things She’s Learned about the way that great poems work to surprise us, transcend time, and take us to unexpected places.

Learn more by clicking in the link in our bio.

#MyFiveThings #KimAddonizio #ThePoemsProgress #PoetryClass #AuthorEvent

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