Dog-Ear: Kim Addonizio's Tell Me

There is a great deal of poetry out there. Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me is one of the fortunate collections to rise above the pitfalls of contemporary poetry, to rise above the usual clichés & staid images, to carry with it a strong sense of place & emotion without resorting to tricks, pity or force. Instead Tell Me is a return to the grounded & far-reaching powers of confessional poetry (keeping in mind “confessional” does not denote “autobiographical”), a collection that is raw, honest, well written and open to minds of varying principles & speeds. With its long, run-on lines & its concrete images (and occasional formal gestures), the collection allows its content to reach out to the reader while its poetic strengths of metaphor & narrative keep the poems from being merely personal anecdotes & reflections without overwhelming the emotional tenor.

Addonizio’s portraits of desire, love, loss and failure often dwell on the womanly life but these peeks are not exclusively about or to women. She deftly draws the reader in by directly addressing the reader and the emotions we all share in matters of love & life. In her poems, the “I” is not just a persona telling a story or a person demanding your attention; it is a confidante, an intimate voice sharing her pains, reaching out for a hand or another voice. Throughout the collection, she employs concrete imagery that is ambiguous or suggestive enough to go beyond the lines between age, gender and class. Her use of a mundane activity & subject is often one that can be easily identified with by many readers and so is an easy & intimate way to draw the reader in. Here is her poem “Affair” in its entirety:


God it’s sexual, opening a beer when you swore you wouldn’t drink tonight,
taking the first deep gulp, the foam backing up in the long amber neck

of the Pacifico bottle as you set it on the counter, the head spilling over
so you bend to fit your mouth against the cold lip

and drink, because what you are, aren’t you, is a drinker—maybe not a lush,
not an alcoholic, not yet anyway, but don’t you want

a glass of something most nights, don’t you need the gesture
of reaching for it, raising it high and swallowing down and savoring

the sweetness, or the scalding, knowing you’re going to give yourself to it
like a lover, whether or not he fills up the leaky balloon of your heart—

don’t you believe in trying to fill it, no matter what the odds,
don’t you believe it still might happen, aren’t you that kind of woman?


Addonizio utilizes the “you” in order to seemingly address the reader though it could be the speaker addressing herself as well. It is the longing and the simple activity of drinking a beer that brings the reader closer to the speaker. Like Anne Sexton, her poems are not just of the mind or of emotions, but also of the body. Even for a (heterosexual) male reader, there is a sense of taking in that is not physical in the way Addonizio relates it for women but rather in the desire & need to fill up one’s heart with love or companionship. The poem could just as easily end with “aren’t you that kind of person” because the hope & longing in the poem is not a feminine subject but a human subject, a concern that goes beyond the metaphors and cuts to the bone. And doesn’t every person want “a glass of something most nights”, something that fills up his or her heart & life?

The exchange Addonizio creates between the poems and their audience is one of sharing. In interviews she talks about how writing has been a kind of escape or therapy from everyday life, an affirmation of the life she has and can have. Poetry, for reader and writer alike, is often a consolatory activity. The title poem of her collection is the best example of where the lines between reader, writer and speaker blur so that they all share in the act of listening, confiding and resting on each other’s shoulders. She begins, “I’m going to stop thinking about my losses now/and listen to yours. I’m so sick of dragging them//wherever I go, like children up too late”. The first lines of the poem are literally an opening-up, a gesture toward the other as if to say we all have problems, let’s talk share them for a bit, a treatment of conversation as a kind of personal exorcism. Then the poem takes a turn toward escapism. Sharing each other’s plights is fine; after all, misery loves company but to wallow in it is to make more of what you want to get away from. The speaker declares she will send her children off and drink into the night but first she extends her own sympathy after asking for ours saying, “So tell me. Tell me how you hurt/even though I can’t help you.” In a subtle, indirect manner the speaker declares that we can share in each other’s troubles, comfort each other but we can’t always help each other but we can still escape it for a little, first in sharing, then in revelry. After all, the late night bar scene, the clubs, the midnight bowling leagues, all sorts of activities we indulge is to get away from our losses, our troubles, at the very least to get away from the same old. And so the speaker asks us to share our troubles but “then, please, dance with me,/hold me while we fool ourselves/they aren’t out there”. Problems may not go away, may not be solved, but the moments we can find ourselves taken away from them is one of the reasons why we yearn for companionship, why we try to make room in the crowded spaces of our lives & our bodies.

Confessional poetry seeks to open up avenues for poet & reader to find their way toward a proverbial Emerald City or home, a place to be comfortable in if even for just a little while. Addonizio’s Tell Me is, with its joys & sorrows, a masterful reenactment of memory & forgetting, the two halves of our emotional & embodied lives that keep us going. In wrestling them we might find solace. In sharing them we find we are not alone, which is perhaps the most important aspect of her collection “and finally/you depend on that, you pray it’s enough/to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.”