In this collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.In "Beautiful Lady of the Snow," young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in "Night Owls," a young college student's crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in "Cancer Poems," a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in "Intuition," a young girl's sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend's father; and in the collection's title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner's wife.Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation:...

A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world.Kim Addonizio's sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We're Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet's characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high...

"Somewhere between Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Amy Schumer's stand-up exists Kim Addonizio's style of storytelling . . . at once biting and vulnerable, nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality." —Refinery29"Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham." —BooklistA dazzling, edgy, laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing, drinking, dating, and more Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as "Charles Bukowski in a sundress." ("Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?" she muses.) Now, in this utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age. Addonizio vividly...

Previously considered the domain of bikers and a rite of passage in the services, tattoos have crawled from society's fringes and onto the ankles of starlets and the biceps of bankers. In this volume, stories from writers including Sylvia Plath and Ray Bradbury capture the tattoo experience.