Jimmy & Rita

When Jimmy moves in with Rita, the two young junkie-protagonists of this debut collection celebrate: ""That afternoon they make love/ on the living room rug,/ finishing a bottle/ of Jim Beam."" Later, when Jimmy wakes at dusk, he realizes that he ""hates this time of day,/ feels death coming on like a punch/ he won't duck in time."" The doomed lovers, moving from the West Coast to the East and back, spring to life as we follow them through a series of first- and third-person narratives that are grouped in three chronological sections. What stands out are the sharp edges as Addonizio follows the course of these lives in straightforward language, her free verse preserving a sweetness within the gritty details of intravenous drug use, blackouts, fistfights, eviction, imprisonment and homelessness. In this unadorned exposure of the diminishing prospects of their life on the social fringes, Addonizio reaches some profound and lyrical moments, especially in the Jimmy poems. She gives us fully dimensioned characters and marks moments of their lives authoritatively. But the details of her characters' destitution and the underlying romanticism that threads through the poems mix more convincingly in discrete poems than in the story as a whole.(Jan.)