Kim Addonizio

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE
Poems by Kim Addonizio

I can’t get over “What is This Thing Called Love.” It’s the first thing I want to read when I get up, and the last thing I want to read before I fall asleep. Frequently, and much to my delight, it stays with me in my bed all night. And not since Lunch Poems have I, so dearly, reveled in knowing that a glossy paperback is in a pocket of my purse.

Addonizio’s poems are sexy, that’s clear. So often are you faced with the flesh and raw human form, even the least demure will turn and blush.

I am going to let him stretch out on my bed
so I can take the heavy richness of him in
and in, I am going to have it back the only way I can.

But Addonizio’s poems are sexy and alluring for more than their content. She skillfully slides her reader through long sinuous sentences that mount with detail and weave through personal history and memories. She creates an incredible and unique suspense. These are poems with pulses. They beat in time and also quiver.

Certainly, the tempo—not surprising for a blues lover, a poet who claims that in an alternate universe she would have been an “old black man sitting on the porch playing blues harmonica all day long” and has a poem titled Blues for Robert Johnson—is one of the poems’ most carefully crafted elements. It would be impossible to hurry through one of her poems, the way it is impossible to hurry through singing the blues.

The book, which is divided into five sections, works hard to answer the question posed in its title. Addonizio explores the strange quietness and wildness of this all-consuming emotion as it applies to (just naming a few) romantic love, love of friends, country, parents, self, children, travel, politics, and siblings.

One of the greatest delights of this book is its range of provocations. From acknowledging the ease with which she’ll harm her lover to the eerie desire for scenes of dead girls in film, to why the word “Fuck” is clearly a topic most unsuited for poetry, there seem few topics she won’t touch. And although the over all tone packs and punch—there’s no doubt Ms. Kim is one tough cookie—there are times when the speaker seems less confident, less certain of how to maneuver through this thing called love. These are the poems that stand out.

My absolute favorite poem in the book is Dear Reader. I love it for the dinner of cookies and vodka, and for the shattering glass outside, for its unabashed astonishment, and because it reminds me that even when you’re all alone love is still there to torment and comfort.

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Addonizio, Kim. What is this Thing Called Love. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2004.

Author’s website: www.kimaddonizio.com