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.

From lilting lines about a love that "dizzies up the brain's back room" to haunting fragments betokening death and decline in a suffering world, Kim Addonizio articulates the ways that our connections to the world, to self, and to others endure and help make us whole."

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well.

In this fortuitous collaboration, two spirited poets, themselves teachers of poetry, offer guidance to aspiring beginners and those who have already published. Brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing are each followed by distinctive writing exercises. ("Compare an actual family photograph with one that was never taken, but might have been.") The ups and downs of the writing life—including the inevitable visitations of self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published. A special section contains twenty-minute writing exercises, and valuable appendixes cover further reading and marketing advice. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

Numerous examples of contemporary poetry, chosen for relevance and freshness, illustrate salient points and stimulate the imagination. By calling on their own experience and focusing on living American writers for their models, the authors introduce you to poetry as it is right now.

Kim Addonizio's sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We're Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikannit-drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet's characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more. Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf. Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar. A poet whose "voice lifts from the page, alive and biting" (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, "if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming."

"The creative process is just that," maintains Kim Addonizio. "Not a means to an end, but an ongoing participation." A widely acclaimed poet and finalist for the National Book Award, Addonizio meditates on her own process as she encourages writers to explore both their personal and political worlds, to seek inspiration from poets new and old, and to discover the rich poetic resources of the Internet. Lively, accessible, and informative, Ordinary Genius?provides wisdom gleaned through personal experience and offers a heady variety of writing exercises. Chapters on gender, addiction, race and class, metaphor and line invite each individual writer to find and to hone his or her unique voice. This is the perfect book for both experienced writers and beginners eager to glimpse the angel of poetry.

Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash 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 Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth. From "Scrapbook": We believe in the one-ton rose and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues assume you understand not much, and try to be alive, just as we do, and that it may be helpful to hold the hand of someone as lost as you.

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life's dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected joy. Whether looking outward to events on the world stage-the war in Iraq, the 2004 Asian tsunami-or inward at struggles with the self, these poems aim at the heart and against the feeling that Lucifer may have already won the day. from "Lucifer at the Starlite" Here's my bright idea for life on earth: better management. The CEO has lost touch with the details. I'm worth as much, but I care; I come down here, I show my face, I'm a real regular. A toast: To our boys and girls in the war, grinding through sand, to everybody here, our host who's mostly mist, like methane rising

In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem. In Beautiful Lady of the Snow, young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in Night Owls, a young college student s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in Cancer Poems, a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in Intuition, a young girl s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend s father; and in the collection s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner s wife. The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts." Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making."

Somewhere between Jo Ann Beard sThe Boys of My Youthand Amy Schumer s stand-up exists Kim Addonizio s style of storytelling . . . at once biting and vulnerable, nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality. Refinery29 Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham. Booklist A dazzling, edgy, laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing, drinking, dating, and more Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as Charles Bukowski in a sundress. ( Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu? she muses.) Now, in this utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age. Addonizio vividly captures moments of inspiration at the writing desk (or bed) and adventures on the road from a champagne-and-vodka-fueled one-night stand at a writing conference to sparsely attended readings at remote Midwestern colleges. Her crackling, unfiltered wit brings colorful life to pieces like What Writers Do All Day, How to Fall for a Younger Man, and Necrophilia (that is, sexual attraction to men who are dead inside). And she turns a tender yet still comic eye to her family: her father, who sparked her love of poetry; her mother, a former tennis champion who struggled through Parkinson s at the end of her life; and her daughter, who at a young age chanced upon some erotica she had written forPenthouse. At once intimate and outrageous, Addonizio s memoir radiates all the wit and heartbreak and ever-sexy grittiness that her fans have come to love and that new readers will not soon forget."