Kim Addonizio’s poems have a messy intensity I can’t get enough of. They have everything: hatred, fear, disgust, and self-disgust, and also delight, desire, forgiveness, and love. “Everyone’s aspiring to something, it’s exhausting,” she writes in “Target Audience” (brilliant title). And not likely to end well. Her poems have a lot of agitation, and also a lot of agita—they’re both mournful and aggressive: “I stamp my foot and say ‘ENOUGH’ to drown out the sound of tiny bones / cracking underneath me.” “Shame” begins as a raunchy catalog of places she the poet has had sex: “Once in a duck blind.” (Really? A duck blind? I’ve never even seen one!) But erotic joy is complicated, as so often is the case for women, by humiliation. Joy wins, but it’s a struggle.
Complexity and contrast are the key to Addonizio’s poems. “They are what’s left,” she writes of artifacts in a Mexican museum:
teeth
and the precious, dirty jewelry
of a wealthy someone in a tomb
preserved behind glass, in such
tender light.
(“In the Valley of Oaxaca”)
Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s “In Rio, After an Ill-Fated Romance” is full of exciting contrasts. We have a street market in which brooms and buckets mingle with fruits and vegetables and bootleg CDs. It’s all so colorful and sexy and cheerful (well maybe not the mannequins that look like sex dolls—something a bit darker there), even the coconut man “grinding the flesh into piles of snow” who jokingly wants to marry our poet. The contrast comes with the elderly couple, “their arms wrapped around / each other’s waists,” trundling a load of manioc roots. They’ve clearly seen better days. The tenderness with which the man helps the woman into the bus contrasts with the garish and jocular sexuality of the market, and also with the “ill-fated romance” of the title. As the pounding of the manioc suggests, ridding relationships—or one’s memory—of “bitterness and poison” can take a lot of work.
There’s a lot of bitterness and poison under the surface in Jill Solnicki’s “My Mother’s Mother’s Photograph.” In a family, it can go back generations, as the title suggests. Solnicki gives us a bleak, rather depressed atmosphere worlds away from Osterman’s colorful Brazilian market. The poet’s sister puts up a photo of her mother’s mother to comfort the mother in her (last?) illness, but all it does is make the sick woman feel guilty (“I was a bad daughter.”). The picture is turned to the wall: “And so / my mother saw, from her bed, that flat stapled-paper backing, / faceless in its black frame.” The poet’s own memory of her grandmother is just as bleak, just as mysterious: “back turned, facing away.”
To end on a more hopeful note, there’s Cindy Frenkel’s lovely “Vignette.” Here an inherited gift of an antique Blue Flow tea set connects to a porcelain pitcher holding the poet’s father’s paintbrushes, “their bristles like little bud-brooms,” and the poet’s own attempt at ceramics from her distant college days. Some things do last—art for example, and the memory of making it. Let’s hold on to that.
