The Philosopher's Club

Kim Addonizio has her own cadence, her own music. She looks into the world, seeing not only its surfaces but its inner geography. She grasps the central human problem of mortality and evokes it with images we have not seen before. —Erica Jong

In these poems, there is an unabashed willingness to let memory enter and take over; they are purgatorial, and elegiac, and unashamed. They touch the borders of course; such poems insist on touching borders, and they flirt with self-love and spidery self-contemplation the way a reckless person flirts with deep water or the metal plates at the edge of a bridge, but they save themselves from falling-and from drowning-through their accuracy, their precision, and their desperate search for understanding." —Gerald Stern

Those who miss the directness of Forche's earlier works should turn to the amazing new BOA Editions book by San Francisco poet Kim Addonizio. The celestial clan gathers, in this collection of shorter lyric poems, more in bars than battlefields, demonstrating the uncanniness of a single woman's daily life. As a first book, The Philosopher's Club is an edgy, sexy collection whose worst notes are acceptable, and whose best astound." —Jan Van Stavern, Mockingbird

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GRAVITY

Carrying my daughter to bed
I remember how light she once was,
no more than a husk in my arms.
There was a time I could not put her down,
so frantic was her crying if I tried
to pry her from me, so I held her
for hours at night, walking up and down the hall,
willing her to fall asleep. She'd grow quiet,
pressed against me, her small being alert
to each sound, the tension in my arms, she'd take
my nipple and gaze up at me,
blinking back fatigue she'd fight whatever terror
waited beyond my body in her dark crib. Now
that she's so heavy I stagger beneath her,
she slips easily from me, down
into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed,
fixed there like a second, dimmer star,
though the stars are not fixed: someone
once carried the weight of my life.

 

THEM

That summer they had cars, soft roofs crumpling
over the back seats. Soft, too, the delicate fuzz
on their upper lips and the napes of their necks,
their uneven breath, their tongues tasting
of toothpaste. We stole the liquor
glowing in our parents' cabinets, poured it
over the cool cubes of ice with their hollows
at each end, as though a thumb had pressed
into them. The boys rose, dripping, from long
blue pools, the water slick on their backs
and bellies, a sugary glaze; they sat easily on high
lifeguard chairs, eyes hidden by shades,
or came up behind us to grab the fat we hated
around our waists. For us it was the chaos
of makeup on a bureau, the clothes we tried on
and on, the bras they unhooked, pushed
up, and when they moved their hard
hidden cocks against us we were always
princesses, our legs locked. By then we knew
they would come, climb the tower, slay anything
to get to us. We knew we had what they wanted:
the breasts, the thighs, the damp hairs pressed flat
under our panties. All they asked was that we let them
take it. They would draw it out of us like
sticky taffy, thinner and thinner until it snapped
and they had it. And we would grow up
with that lack, until we learned how to
name it, how to look in their eyes and see nothing
we had not given them; and we could still
have it, we could reach right down into their
bodies and steal it back.