Jimmy & Rita

Addonizio writes in gritty and graphic detail... —Library Journal

One of the wonderful things about Jimmy & Rita is that Kim Addonizio never imposes herself in any way, so the poems sing themselves into us. We experience the victories and defeats of Jimmy and Rita as they struggle through the boundless claustrophobia of their world. I think of them and there is a sense of sadness within me. Yet I think of what Addonizio has accomplished and I feel joy. —Hubert Selby, Jr.

The full achievement of Jimmy & Rita is greater than I have space to discuss, but Addonizio's cinematic use of shifting points of view and voice-overs is enormously effective; and her speedy, jazzily syncopated free verse in the third-person narratives and dramatic monologues, combined with her tersely astute prose poems, establishes her as a virtuoso of the craft just as surely as her characters prove her a fearless explorer of the most brutal, and often unsung, regions of the human heart.
—Diann Blakely Shoaf, Ploughshares

"It's really a novel skillfully disguised as poems, an impossible love story stripped down to its most telling moments and most beautiful sentences. Tough and compassionate, Addonizio charts the trajectory of a too-young couple suffering through heroin and abuse, sweet moments and hard time." —Minal Hajratwala, San Jose Mercury News

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BEER. MILK. THE DOG. MY OLD MAN.

My old man used to take the dog
out to the garage
where the poker game was
and set down a bowl
of beer, that's the kind of thing
he thought was funny. He used to
give me some too and laugh when I
threw up or fell over
a chair. He taught me to fight
by smacking the side of my head
with his open hand, calling me
a pussy. Don't let them give you
any shit he said. When he smacked
my mother she didn't hit back,
just yelled at him. Once she threw
a glass of milk at his head.
It hit the wall and broke
to pieces on the floor.

I was ten when he died.
Too young to figure it out.
What I thought about was the milk
on the kitchen floor that time,
how they'd both
left it there and gone to bed.
The dog got to it and swallowed glass.
My mother said the dog
just got sick. The milk
evaporated she said.
Meaning it just
went into the air.
I thought how could something
be there and then not. Milk.
The dog. My old man. He loved
a cold beer. Sometimes I'd sit up
at night in the garage and watch
how he drank it, tipping his head
way back, and I'd try to drink mine
exactly the same,
but quietly, so he wouldn't notice
and send me away.

 

INSIDE

dinner tray walls dreams cigarette guards toothbrush dinner tray

cigarette magazine walls shadow movie photograph cigarette

cement yard cigarette spoons toilet cigarette harmonica cement yard

stars sleep tattoos cement yard sleep walls stars