Customer Reviews

Jimmy & Rita (American Poets Continuum)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My first reaction to Jimmy & Rita was that this wasn't Addonizio's earlier The Philosopher's Club. It felt, therefore, like a disappointment, with each poem too dependent on the one before or the one that followed to have the same impact as the "standalones" of her first volume. Yeah, but. I found myself thinking about those two people, Jimmy and Rita, and their friends and families. I began to imagine them inhabiting a very real space inside me as well as in California and Trenton, New Jersey (Kim, have you ever been to Trenton?--it's every bit as awful as you might imagine). I went back and reread. The language is spare, deceptive, apparently realistic but opening up both the beauty and ugliness of love, its passion, ferocity, and disillusionment. At the end it is indeed a novel in verse, a testimony about survival, of having to let go of a beloved hand when the person at the end of that beloved hand is drowning and threatens to pull you under too. It is a long, urban epic, and it is treasurable because it is entirely unforgettable.

This series of poems by Addonizio is quite different from here other two collections, but it fits very well into her body of work. Jimmy & Rita is the story of two troubled people, how they met and what happened to them. I've heard it said that for poetry to succeed it has to take back the story from prose. Addonizio's poems definitely do that.

Unlike most modern day poets Ms. Addonizio has more to say than how warm and beautiful love is. She gets to the heart of life and love in a unique revolutionary way. I whole-heartendly reccommend this refreshing and unusual book

Kim Addonizio keeps shocking me by putting out books unlike any I've ever read. She is an eloquent, smart, sassy and just plain intelligent writer. By this book and if you missed her other one read it too. You won't be sorry

I am so saddened to see that this book is out of print because I think it is exciting to see someone telling a story through verse. Yes, I know this is not unique. I have read a few other memoirs and "novels" that were written in verse rather than prose. Which is why I don't always feel that the choice is effective. After reading this book, I wanted to find more works by Kim Addonizio.

I pray that this book finds its way back in print because without it the literary world has lost a lovely light.

The most incredible piece of poetry I've ever read. Ms. Addonizio has proven that poetry truly can be found in the most unlikely places. I'm anxiously awaiting her novel...in the meantime, pick up this book, even if you hate poetry. It will open your eyes.

Kim Addonizio's short imagistic tour through the lives of a prostitute and failed 24-year-old boxer make you feel as if you are in a three-dimensional film. This is literary impressionism, in a way similar to Brett Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, but kicked up a couple of notches, or three, to reach a perfect-pitch elegance of objective poetic writing. Addonizio, who also seems (in my limited purview) to be the most striking poet to hit American letters since Bukowski, uses a counterpoint of first-person and omniscient narrator to give us her literary cinema verite. It's like an Altman film, only with access to the characters mental states. The masterful poetics makes heavy use of images, and the feeling of absolute objectivity is achieved because, not in spite of, the roving entry into first person narration. This is the way God would see, it feels, if there were a God. I would say that the explosive naturalism here, which makes use of narrative and film-like imagery within the confines of a poetry chapbook, qualifies as a new genre. Part of this technique can also be traced, I think, to Carver's minimalism which, by rendering extreme close-ups with an absolute simplicity of style, sans Hemingwayesque attachments to the male persona, forged a virtually unassailable minimalism. Now I know Paul West will disagree but hey...like the man said, the opposite of a great truth is a great truth. The only reason not to praise Addonizio too much is for fear of jinxing her future output.

I kept wondering why verse for these little stories? with Louise gluck, for example, you are haunted by what's left out. here, there's just not enough room to fill in the gaps. certainly not a boring book, but upon completion oddly unsatisfying. many of the poems reminded me of early billy joel songs, although there's much more here that shocks. after reading this book i happened to read last exit to brooklyn for the first time and it wiped out any memory i had of the characters/situations in jimmy and rita.