In Now We're Getting Somewhere: Poems, the forever irreverent, National Book Award-nominated poet Kim Addonizio (Bukowski in a Sundress; Tell Me) delivers another knockout collection in some three dozen poems. Accolades tower for the prolific Addonizio, recipient of fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim, and Pushcart Prizes across genres. It's no surprise--in Addonizio's treatment, subjects as various as misogyny, climate change, hotel bars, literary critics, convalescence, orgasms and John Keats become heartbreaking, gut-busting, shattering.
Addonizio shapeshifts. She toggles easily between the humorous and the brutal, sincere and sarcastic, confessional and political--often in the same poems. "Little Old Ladies" devastates with its portrait of aging, stabs of black humor offering cold comfort. "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall" bleeds emotion. In "Fixed and in Flux," Addonizio probes the stakes of worldviews: "Nine planets/ seemingly forever and then suddenly/ Pluto's demoted./ The king is dead!/ .../ Meanwhile, a sea worm slithers through a mortgage./ 72% of Americans believe in angels,/ no wonder that parasitic amoeba got elected."
How to cope? In "Résumé," after Dorothy Parker's classic, Addonizio concludes with martini wit: "Friends are distracted;/ Aging stinks;/ You'll soon be subtracted;/ You might as well drink."
But around the corner from depression and dark humor, hope beckons. However far Addonizio lures readers from comfort, she yet suggests perseverance, possibility. In the collection's final poem, "Stay," Addonizio closes: "Please wait for the transmissions, however faint./ Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white/ roses not meant for you,/ they're meant for you." --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer