Wild Nights

'Kim Addonizio's imagination is like a runaway train under perfect control. Nuanced, shaded and unshaded, her poems are bold, brave, respectful of the darkness, perfectly pitched, and virtually every one reverberates with a kind of wild tenderness' - Thomas Lux.; 'Addonizio's honesty and self-knowledge will pierce you to the core' - Carolyn Kizer.; 'With a noir gusto, Addonizio's passionate monologues draw you into the boudoir of narrative and keep you there until she's finished. Her sleekly told story-meditations are both terribly familiar and wonderfully intense' - Tony Hoagland.; 'Reading a poem by Kim Addonizio is like driving down a deserted road, late at night, and hearing a song on the radio so good you have to pull over. Indeed, this poet is tuned into all the joy and suffering for miles around... She is a poet of brave sensuality and intimacy, for whom the heart is an "intial-scarred tabletop"' - Martin Espada.; 'Like any good nighthawk, Addonizio finds Eros and loss inseparable, where they lurk in lovers' exchanges and at the bottom of empty gin bottles. But these poems serve as affirmations too, in long lyrical questions-and-answers that push on into the early morning, braving last call' - The New Yorker.; 'If you hear, like I do, Lady Day singing "Good Morning Heartache", as you turn these pages heading toward a new poem by one of America's best poets, then you are in the right precinct of feeling and intelligence. With as much casual anguish, resilience, and unrelenting beauty, Kim Addonizio writes as though human survival in the raw requires a moral refutation of existential melancholy. The blues poem is her weapon, and arguably, like Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and others since, Addonizio shows how the blues poem is truly about a magnificent affirmation of life rather than the sources of its sorrows. She proves once again, the blues is our first and distinct contribution to global poetry, and she plays them for a new world with a new sensibility' - Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep.