Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

Addonizio, already known as an accomplished poet (Lucifer at the Starlite) and fiction writer (The Palace of Illusions), shows a knack for memoir as well in this essay collection. Organized according to no particular chronology, the pieces serve as windows into the life of a successful mid-career poet: the underpaid writing panels, boozy conferences, and daily struggle to actually get words down on page. Her writing is charmingly self-aware, at times confessional (a descriptor she likens to being tarred and feathered), but never apologetic. She wears her sexual misadventures, her drinking habits, and her anxieties over abandonment and failure like a badge, if not of honor, then of identity. The daughter of tennis champion Pauline Betz, she writes stunningly about watching her mother's battle with Parkinson's disease, as well as about her own experience as a mother, to the actress Aya Cash. In the collection's eponymous essay, Addonizio recalls learning that a critic had called her "Bukowski in a sundress," prompting a thoughtful critique of sexism that concludes with her suggestion that this icon of literary machismo might one day be known as "Kim Addonizio in pee-stained pants." This is Addonizio in a nutshell: funny, frank, vulgar, and just a little bit vulnerable. Agent: Rob McQuilkin, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (June)