Kim Addonizio

America’s Kim Addonizio has been called ‘one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets’. Her poetry is renowned both for its gritty, street-wise narrators and for a wicked sense of wit. With passion, precision and irreverent honesty, her poems explore life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, joy and suffering, exposing raw emotions often only visible when truly confronting ourselves – jealousy, self-pity, fear, lust. 

'If it is possible for a writer’s poetry to be consistently unexpected, Kim Addonizio’s is that. One has the impression, when reading her best poems, of being a passenger in a sports car being driven by an impossibly glamorous woman. Suddenly the car swerves off the motorway and tears over untested, dangerous and utterly exhilarating new terrain. Long may she continue to publish in Britain.' - Leaf Arbuthnot, Oxford Poetry

‘Kim Addonizio’s imagination is like a runaway train under perfect control. Nuanced, shaded and unshaded, her poems are bold, brave, respectful of the darkness, perfectly pitched, and virtually every one reverberates with a kind of wild tenderness.’ – Thomas Lux

‘Addonizio’s honesty and self-knowledge will pierce you to the core.’ – Carolyn Kizer

‘With a noir gusto, Addonizio’s passionate monologues draw you into the boudoir of narrative and keep you there until she’s finished. Her sleekly told story-meditations are both terribly familiar and wonderfully intense.’ – Tony Hoagland

‘Reading a poem by Kim Addonizio is like driving down a deserted road, late at night, and hearing a song on the radio so good you have to pull over. Indeed, this poet is tuned into all the joy and suffering for miles around…She is a poet of brave sensuality and intimacy, for whom the heart is an “initial-scarred tabletop”.’ – Martín Espada

‘Like any good nighthawk, Addonizio finds Eros and loss inseparable, where they lurk in lovers’ exchanges and at the bottom of empty gin bottles. But these poems serve as affirmations too, in long lyrical questions-and-answers that push on into the early morning, braving last call.’ – The New Yorker