So here to introduce Kim Addonizio
is a good friend of mine, managing editor of Sonora
Review and MFA Candidate in Poetry, Whitney DeVos.
Thank you, Jake.
Kim Addonizio is the celebrated author of two novels,
five collections of poetry, and two acclaimed volumes on craft.
"The Poet's Companion, a Guide to Pleasures
of Writing Poetry," and "Ordinary Genius, a Guide
for the Poet Within," which was published last year.
She has received numerous awards for her work,
including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts,
as well as a Pushcart Prize and the John Ciardi Lifetime
Achievement Award.
Her most recent collection is her fifth,
and is entitled "Lucifer at the Starlight,"
after George Meredith's sonnet detailing the title character's
valiant and yet inherently doomed
ascent at celestial ascension.
"Lucifer at the Starlight" is committed
to framing the frighteningly parallel contemporary plight
of humanity with Addonizio's own inventive
imagination substituting the corporate CEO for Satan
in the title poem.
This collection aligned with the body of her previous work
is urgently engaged with recognizing
the essential and yet paradoxical
dualism of existence.
What begins as light for Addonizio will end in darkness,
and yet, such an end is simultaneously a new beginning.
As she relates the heartbreaks of love and life,
she also sings of their ecstatic pleasures.
Addonizio's poetry is unrelenting.
She's a blues singer in stilettos,
never ceasing to croon towards heaven amidst
the struggles of life on Earth.
Her poems are intensely lyrical in a cracked, and smoky,
and ever-so-sexy way that recalls underground jazz clubs
and post-coital cigarettes.
Her tone is wry, and her voice will seduce you into a romp
or six with paradox.
Her diction and syntax are both vibrant and playful.
Her inquiries are intelligent and necessary,
always composed with an impeccable ear
for the gritty, inevitable, and ultimately beautiful details
that make up the musical notes of our chaotic lives.
Addonizio is John Keats-cum- urban philosopher,
at times speaking, at times whispering, shouting, cursing,
or blessing, sometimes all at once in a language wholly
original, empathetic, and entirely her own.
She speaks directly with her soul and directly to ours.
Her work invites us to experience strength
through being persistently vulnerable,
to expose and cherish the parts we strive to keep hidden
in our own personal darknesses.
Addonizio's poetry unites us all in her insistence
to celebrate this constant struggle of what
Milan Kundera deemed as "the unbearable lightness of being."
Please join me in welcoming the lovely and extraordinary genius
of Kim Addonizio.