cover image Exit Opera

Exit Opera

Kim Addonizio. Norton, $26.99 (112p) ISBN 978-1-324-07893-7

The captivating latest from Addonizio (after Now We’re Getting Somewhere) offers a catalog of real and imagined endings (“after a while, you want to give up/ and say kill me now”) through which a blithe, if slightly intoxicated, voice endures: “I prefer to stay here saying many pointless things.” Whether mocking her own desperation in a dive bar or fleabag motel (“I know my soul is small; it just wants a decent hotel room”), Addonizio is a master of the one-liner: “If you make a mistake, repeat it; that’s what God did.” Amid serious reasons for angst, she notes that her mother’s ashes smell of the jar’s former contents, raspberry jam. The personal is also cosmic: “you be a dead language; I’ll be an extinct civilization.” What Addonizio seems to hate most is sentimentality, though she acknowledges that a sense of loss is hard to shake. In a memory of Paris (visited once 30 years ago), vanished family members and literary figures merge in the living past: “Look at them, alive in this poem, holding their menus & about to disappear./ De Beauvoir weeps as Sartre’s lowered in.” Addonizio never disappoints. (Sept.)