From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Survivors in the most marginalized subcultures of San Francisco, Jimmy and Rita, brutalized counterparts of Romeo and Juliet, discover and maintain a transcendent love each other?in spite of violence, prostitution, crime, alcohol, and drugs (especially heroin). In a gritty sequence of deeply moving narrative poems (including monologs and prose poems), we see their marriage flounder as they move from one squalid apartment to another, the kitchens with "roaches spilling out/ of the kettle." They both hit bottom. Jimmy grows "tired/ of having nothing," and Rita, after working the street and the massage parlors, feels herself "disappearing." Addonizio (The Philosopher's Club, BOA, 1994) writes in gritty and graphic detail, but she makes us care about this special pair of lovers. Deprived of almost everything, Rita is still aware of beauty and transforms the sea at night into a "dark tablecloth/ cleaned of crumbs." Recommended for all collections.?Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
