Mortal Trash: Poems

Mortal Trash: Poems

<p>“Kim Addonizio’s voice lifts from the page, alive and biting—unleashing wit with a ruthless observation.”—<em>San Francisco Book Review</em></p><br /><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><br /><p>From “Scrapbook”:<br /><br /><br /><br />We believe in the one-ton rose<br /><br />and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues<br /><br /><br /><br />assume you understand<br /><br />not much, and try to be alive, just as we do,<br /><br /><br /><br />and that it may be helpful to hold the hand<br /><br />of someone as lost as you.</p>