Good and Evil Go Hand in HandLucifer at the Starlite by Kim AddonizioNorton, W. W. & Company, Inc, 2011“For every forward step a stumbling.A shadow over every starlit thing.”These lines from Addonizio’s poem “Lucifer at the Starlite,” perfectly sum up the collection of poetry within her fifth published book of poetry, Lucifer at the Starlite. Addonizio dives into the complexities of opposite ends: good and bad, happiness and sadness, love and loss, by delivering them with an edgy and witty tone. For every good there is a bad, and for every bad there is some good.Death is a serious matter and although she is sometimes solemn about it, for instance, in her “Another Day on Earth,” a poem about the Tsunami of December 2004, Addonizio more often than not turns death into a sardonic icon. She is scathing in death, with the most cheerful personality in her “September 11” poem, inhabiting everyday people’s lives that go on their merry ways without thinking about the people who have died: “My mother’s friend Annie, her funeral’s today! The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself! And Arafat, he’s dead, too!"There is give and take evident within Addonizo’s poems. One poem titled “The Matter” exemplifies what we continue to do to each other as human beings, that it is a vicious circle of hurting one another that never stops: “Some men aren’t content with mere breakage, they’ve got to burn you to the ground. Some men you’ve reduced to ashes are finally dusting themselves off.”Another poem from the book titled, “Forms of Love,” also demonstrates another type of human behavior, and it’s about how picky and loose we are when giving out our love. Addonizio’s humorous examples of why we love and don’t love someone make it all that more enjoyable because at least everyone has experienced some type of the love described: “I love you but I’m married. I love you but I wish you had more hair. I love you more.”Within one of her poems, “The First Line is the Deepest,” Addonizio tries to make sense of a world that has turned into madness, all in the name of God: “For I am a poet. It is my job, my duty to know wherein lies the beauty of this degraded body,”Not everything is centered on the morbid; Addonizio also focuses on triumphs made throughout the day, no matter how small or substantial, to show that there are reasons worth being alive for in her poem “News.” She finds pleasure from even completing the most mundane tasks like laundry, because she actually accomplished something and didn’t let sadness or grief overtake her: “These were little victories over a sullen god – the one who hunkers down and rocks back and forth, muttering that there’s no good reason to go on.”Overall Addonizio gives a good balance of joy and sadness throughout her collection, and definitely a new, sometimes humorous, perspective on things such as death, happiness after grief, twists on fairy tale endings, war, book burnings, love and much more. This book was frustratingly inconsistent. At its worst, the poems felt familiar in the wrong way, covering ground Addonizio has covered many times before. In some places, especially early on, some forms felt forced, which surprised me, because it's not something I've ever thought about her work. About halfway through, though, something seemed to click for me as a reader. The poems felt fresher, closer, and more desperate. Many poems in the second half of the book build off of the loneliness that resonated through her previous collection Tell Me and I found myself liking many of them enough to reread them a few times right away. If only the entire collection had been that good--I would have been giving it a higher rating.
Do You like book Lucifer At The Starlite: Poems (2009)?
Addonizio describes femininity as if it were a rabid canine on the prowl for blood and more.
—synopsis
was so disappointed by this because I loved "Jimmy and Rita."
—kari
