Mortal Trash: Poems

Mortal Trash: Poems

<p><strong>“Kim Addonizio’s voice lifts from the page, alive and biting―unleashing wit with a ruthless observation.”―<em>San Francisco Book Review</em></strong></p><p>Passionate and irreverent, <em>Mortal Trash</em> transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in <em>Mortal Trash</em> remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.</p><p>From “Scrapbook”:<br /><br /> We believe in the one-ton rose<br /> and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues<br /><br /> assume you understand<br /> not much, and try to be alive, just as we do,<br /><br /> and that it may be helpful to hold the hand<br /> of someone as lost as you.</p>