Mortal Trash

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. (June)