By Alex Kramer
The unflinching realism of some poetry harbors little room for the light-minded individual. In this sense, poet Kim Addonizio’s work holds a classical fixation on life, love, and death — heavy topics that, delivered through Addonizio’s voice, get a little bit of life injected into them.
Addonizio will read from her new memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, as well as from her new poetry collection, Mortal Trash, at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. today.
Addonizio said her writing is interested in exploring what it means to be alive, often through her perennial subjects, love and loss. Whether the diction is universally human or deeply personal, such subject-matter paint is rendered with a brush that is at once wide and attuned to the intimate details.
Kelli Ebensberger, a sales associate at Prairie Lights, said it is the author’s transparency paired with the accessible tone that she employs to discuss her chosen topics — from romance to drug abuse to yoga class, familial mourning to hangovers in the morning — that makes her writing so captivating.
“Addonizio has the ability to handle every aspect of life with equal parts gravitas and humor,” Ebensberger said. “Her wit and vulnerability deftly presents life as this honest, valid experience while resisting being either too melodramatic or too flippant.”
Though it is a diverse collection of various types of poetry, Mortal Trash sticks with a common denominator and subject matter throughout Addonizio’s works.
“I think all writers kind of write about the same things in the end,” she said. “We all write out of our obsessions.”
Bukowski in a Sundress acts as the author’s road map through her writing life in a minor hiatus from poetry. It approaches familial relationships, drinking, depression, and other chapters from Addonizio’s life. It is less a book of writing advice but rather a book about writing and life, how they complement and deter each other.
The title that draws so much attention, Bukowski in a Sundress, comes not out of admiration of the writer — the book’s eponym, Charles Bukowski, is often maligned among literary critics — but rather a reclamation of a clever insult.
“A critic said it about me,” she said. “I don’t think he meant it as a compliment. Even as popular as he is, and how many books he’s published, how famous he is around the world, a lot of literary writers have looked down on him.”
After reading a little Bukowski, she decided to claim the tag rather than be put to shame by it.
Although as she matured as a writer, she found herself inclined to cross over into other genres, enjoying the challenges that present themselves when faced with a new literary, form, Addonizio said she will always be, at heart, a poet. Much like her fascination with love and mortality, poetry has been her calling from the beginning.
“It was probably Sylvia Plath,” she said. “I started out reading some poetry that kind of knocked me out.”
Addonizio said she is excited to be reading in community such as Iowa City, in which literature is valued so dearly, the university being home to such a renowned writing programs.
“I actually got rejected from it years ago,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to have stopped me.”