Exit Opera: Poems

by Kim Addonizio

A new volume by acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio, whose work is known for its streetwise, unflinching explorations of love, lust, and mortality.

Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject—jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers—these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to “[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find” and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life. As she writes in “My Opera”:

The staging is difficult. Exploding starsare involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar containinga tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swellsthat I am steering toward you in the dark. 

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

112 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2024

About the author

Author of several poetry collections including Tell Me, a National Book Award Finalist. My Black Angel is a book of blues poems with woodcuts by Charles D. Jones, from SFA Press. The Palace of Illusions is a story collection from Counterpoint/Soft Skull. A New & Selected, Wild Nights, is out in the UK from Bloodaxe Books.

2016 publications: Mortal Trash, new poems, from W.W. Norton, awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize. A memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, from Penguin.

Two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within.

First novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster and chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, second novel, released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

A new word/music CD, "My Black Angel, "is a collaboration with several musicians and contains all the poems in the book of that name. That and an earlier word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.com. There's an earlier book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,, co-edited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

I teach poetry workshops at conferences and online through my web site. I also play blues harmonica, and I'm learning jazz flute. Music is a good place to focus when I'm in a writing slump.

Reviews

[Keely · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There are feelings no mocktail can cure." If that's a thought that resonates with you like it does with me, then Exit Opera should definitely be your next poetry read. In this collection, Kim Addonizio explores grief, longing, disillusionment, the declining health of friends, and of the natural world, too. There are poems about regrettable lays, gory American TV, charming British TV, wishing for a drink, having that drink, and more--all delivered in Addonizio's singular and memorable style. It's bleak stuff...but pretty darn delightful if you're in the right frame of mind for it.

I'm so happy I stumbled across this on the new books shelf at the library. I've loved Kim Addonizio's poetry since I first read her in the early 2000s, and wow, she remains as amazing as ever. My favorite poem in Exit Opera: "My Opera." My favorite line: "Nature's a beautiful bitch" (from "Upstate"). The book isn't easy and accessible throughout. This is poetry that doesn't lend itself to "takeaways." But it is phenomenal throughout, deep cuts and all, and worth spending some thinky time with.

[katy *ੈ✩‧₊˚ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I know my soul is small, it just wants a decent hotel room
& the man who lies down to sleep so trustingly beside me
to open his eyes & love me”

“whoever said love isn’t pain didn’t know what they were talking about but neither
did I when I said it’s meant to fail”

“childhood, did it ever exist?
what about the bar your father drank in, giving you
endless quarters for pinball… there it goes,
carried aloft by a maniacal wind.”

“my first & only time in Paris was thirty years ago. It was
February and snowing.
I wandered Montparnasse cemetery while heady thoughts
Flurried from the clouds, wet my face & disappeared.
Everyone I loved was still alive.”

“mostly I try not to think at all anymore
just stare at the place between words & their meanings
& wait for some less monstrous feeling to be born
& stumble toward me”

[Sophie Crocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Saw Kim Addonizio Play The Blues At A Church In DTLA

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kim Addonizio is undeniably a talented poet. She has a well-honed sense of rhythm, and she also has the knack of placing words just so in order to silhouette and then reveal whatever impression she's trying to capture on paper.

Tonally, though, "Exit Opera" felt calculatedly cynical and nihilistic. Filled with ruminations on death and drinking oneself into oblivion, it seems aligned with our times but unable to surpass them. Her poems have that 21st century-online feeling, with the generalized angst of all the world's problems piling up into one post.

Addonizio's perspective on the topics she raises is clever and often funny, but the tendency to wallow felt more like a posture than true, arrived-at feeling.

In Assisi

This souvenir shop is full of skinny wooden crucified Christs
like there weren't enough of those in the churches already

I guess everyone has to believe in something
Crystals, colonics, when you die you get virgins or your very own planet
where you can spin for eternity in your celestial underpants

Some people believe Jesus spoke to Saint Francis, but I have a feeling
Jesus is just going to hang there silently
looking holy & tormented for another two thousand years or so

I don't think I'm going to get a Catholic miracle, like a statue blinks at me
& I suddenly understand Italian Greek Latin Aramaic & Ugaritic

or peel off my tattoos & send the carved lions of my higher self
to tear apart the lambs of my addictions

I'll probably just go on kneeling before minibars in hotel rooms
in my silk robe of flowers, praising the macadamias

One story about Saint Francis is that two years before he died he got stigmata
Probably malaria or leprosy, but imagine those sores

He dressed in a mended sack & old worn sandals
If you saw him in Berkeley you might cross the street to avoid him
then come back with some change & try not to touch his hand

At the end of his life he was going blind, living in a reed hut overrun
by mice
Mice slithering over his feet, mice climbing the table to sit on his plate
I guess they figured out that the job of a saint is to suffer as horribly as
possible

Joan of Arc burned & cast into the Seine
Saint Agnes raped & stabbed in the throat

Oliver Plunkett:
imprisoned
hanged
drawn & quartered
beheaded
beatified
canonized

Brother Sun, Sister-in-Law Death, forgive me
I don't see the point of all this pain, or believing it gets better
when you're boxed & delivered to the parade of microbes that will devour
your corpse

I know my soul is small, it just wants a decent hotel room
& the man who lies down to sleep so trustingly beside me
to open his eyes & love me

[Stephanie B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kim Addinizio is the wise elder we all need. It’s lovely to have a woman in this role, full of wisdom, wit, clarity and compassion towards a life fully lived often on the edge or in the margins.

One of her most widely shared poems is the one about the girl crying in the bathroom stall and she’s been likened to a female Bukowski, although this seems to do her a disservice outside of the fact that his name is well known so hopefully it brings more people to her work. I would have loved to have read her rather than Bukowski when I was young. She is entirely her own.

This book deals quite a bit with growing old and end of life, several poems revolve around life in older age, and finding cancers, and rather humorously watching a lot of TV (there’s an entire poem dedicated to the show “American Horror Story” which is also, I assume, as the title suggests an homage to the actual American Horror Story).

There’s so much to gain from reading this book and poetry in general! Poetry plants in one’s brain differently from other genres, and it provides soothing relief and I find it really difficult to describe as it’s so rich with feeling. Although the subject can be bleak at times, she's dealing with themes of existence, and every word in these poems is so perfect reminding us there is comfort to be found in poetry.
I’ll stop now with this little write-up and just share a few really stunning ones here so they can speak for themselves - they are so good.


SOME OF THE QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?
It's hard to know which is worse, the nightmare of approaching tornadoes
or waking from the dream your parents were alive in.
Enter the ominous music announcing the shark.
It is best to disappear into one's work.
Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested, mentioning other things besides wine but most people ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue?
Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best but to be misunderstood is not the goal.
I don't need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said, and drew his wife's face exploding into spheres.
What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look,
said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible
off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak.
We're all afloat in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them
to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains
seven octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go?
Not yet, not yet. Let's meet for an aperitivo.
Let's build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.

MY OPERA
takes place in a dive bar, it's all drunken recitative,
okay maybe an aria sung by a feral kitten, one
by a skittish donkey, maybe one without words
just the sounds of lovemaking, moans, laughter, wailing,
it ends with a dramatic flourish like smashing a glass
in the fireplace, I always wanted to do that
& watch the flames flare up. It's not a long opera,
maybe fourscore years give or take, everyone
gets their own glass & pours out whatever's in it
onto the floor. The staging is difficult. Exploding stars
are involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,
a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar
containing a tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swells
that I am steering toward you in the dark.

EXISTENTIAL ELEGY
Maybe everyone is walking around thinking something abstract and
ontological
like The existence of others as a freedom defines my situation

and is even the condition of my own freedom. Maybe De Beauvoir
opens her notebook & writes it as soon as she sits down at the Deux Magots.

Life is inherently meaningless, probably thinks Sartre, across from her at the
table,
studying the waiter. The chef savagely prepares a tart for its destruction.

Yet the street lamps blink on without thinking Light, then nothing ...
as the booksellers along the Seine close their green boxes.

Humming, a woman pulls her damp dress from a basket,
then clothespins her simulacrum to the line.

So maybe not everyone. Maybe I can just lie here on the couch & pet the cat
the rest of the afternoon. He seems troubled

ever since the other one died. He won't chase that snaky rainbow thing
when I drag it over the carpet. What is he thinking? Snaky rainbow things

are but fleeting pleasures distracting us from the terror of the void that awaits us?
My first & only time in Paris was thirty years ago. It was February, &
snowing.

I wandered Montparnasse cemetery while heady thoughts flurried
from the clouds, wet my face & disappeared. Everyone I loved was still alive.

Paris is still there. The bouquinistes too— rare editions & magazines,
postcards, souvenirs.
The Deux Magots is still there. But now, supposedly, everyone interesting
goes to the Flore.
Look at them, alive in this poem, holding their menus & about to disappear.
De Beauvoir weeps as Sartre's lowered in.

[Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A toast to all our frailty / and the mess we make of everything eventually.”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC!

Full Rating: 4.5 stars rounded up

Exit Opera by Kim Addonizio is a hauntingly sardonic exploration of what it means to be alive, steeped in the futility of attempting to control the uncontrollable aspects of our existence. From the opening poem, Addonizio's speaker grapples with the impossibility of mastering life, ultimately suggesting that perhaps the best course of action is to relinquish control and embrace life's unpredictability. Allusions to Greek mythology, philosophy, and literature are woven throughout the collection, adding depth to the speaker’s reflections on the absurdity of existence.

Addonizio confronts the dualities that define our lives—hope and despair, faith and doubt, life and death—often opting for a darkly humorous resignation rather than a definitive conclusion. The speaker's musings on religion and the search for meaning are particularly poignant; despite exploring spirituality as a potential answer to existential woes, she ultimately finds it wanting, leaving her to navigate the vastness of existence with a drink in hand.

What stands out most in Exit Opera is the speaker's palpable sense of smallness in the face of a chaotic, indifferent world. Yet, amid this bleakness, there are moments of solace found in nature, art, and connection with others. Addonizio balances this tension masterfully, acknowledging the inevitability of decay and death while still clinging to fleeting glimpses of hope. The poems are at once introspective and irreverent, blending the everyday with the philosophical in a way that feels both surreal and deeply grounded.

Stylistically, Addonizio’s language is vivid and sharp, oscillating between sardonic wit and poignant reflection. Her imagery is eclectic, often juxtaposing the absurd with the profound to evoke a sense of disorientation and contemplation. While the collection may lose some cohesion toward the end, Exit Opera remains a powerful addition to Addonizio’s body of work, resonating deeply in these uncertain times. For fans of Melissa Broder and Miranda July, this collection, with its blend of humor, pain, and introspective beauty, is sure to resonate with many of us in these times of increasing uncertainty.

📖 Recommended For: Admirers of dark humor and existential themes, readers who enjoy poetry that blends the mundane with the philosophical, those intrigued by explorations of mortality and the absurdity of life, fans of Melissa Broder and Miranda July.

🔑 Key Themes: The Futility of Control, Mortality and Decay, Existential Loneliness, The Search for Meaning, The Tension Between Faith and Doubt, Finding Solace in Art and Connection.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Mental Illness (minor), Pandemic (minor), Rape (minor), Alcohol (minor), Alcoholism (minor), Drug Abuse (minor), Drug Use (minor), Cancer (minor), Gun Violence (minor).

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

From "Self-Portrait with a Statue of Fernando Pessoa:"
Sometimes I just want to go someplace quiet enough to hear my bones
grinding together
Then again maybe the world isn’t terrible & I just need a different leave-in
smoothing conditioner
A compact folding home treadmill to get me moving again

I'm not sure I remember how Addonizio came across my radar, but she really captures that sort of schizophrenic nature of modern life (the everyday absurdities where we're all dealing with harsh reality vs daily obligations vs the false promises of materialism). There's a wonderful blend of wit and vulnerability and, to me, odd cadences/breaks that capture life's dissonance. I will definitely be reading more of her work.

Favorites from this collection include: Some of the Questions to Consider (posted below), Insomnia Song, Swoon, This Too Shall Pass, Beatitude

----------------------------------
THE STANDOUT WORD THAT SNAGGED IN MY SULCI
abyssopelagic
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"Some of the Questions to Consider"

Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf
or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?
It’s hard to know which is worse,
the nightmare of approaching tornadoes
or waking from the dream your parents were alive in.
Enter the ominous music announcing the shark.
It is best to disappear into one’s work.
Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested,
mentioning other things besides wine but most people
ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue?
Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best
but to be misunderstood is not the goal.
I don’t need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said,
and drew his wife’s face exploding into spheres.
What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look,
said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible
off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak.
We’re all afloat in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them
to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains
7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go?
Not yet, not yet. Let’s meet for an aperitivo.
Let’s build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to Edelweiss and W.W. Norton & Company for the ARC!

Kim Addonizio’s Exit Opera is an existential, hedonistic collection stylistically shaded with the confidence of one glass too many.

This is a book that examines mortality and refuses consolation. Addonizio takes a profane delight in suggesting that the horrors of a life after death would easily surpass any misfortune beforehand. This is a problem—the current misfortunes are pretty bad. The poet exhaustedly narrates a life where crisis has become mundane, and she muses over it with a startling detachment.

The speaker somehow has it both ways, escalating any existential anxieties to a fever pitch before cutting through them with the acidity of a drunken belch. These are poems written in death’s wake; they respond to failed religious comforts with a long drag on a cigarette and a raised middle finger. Addonizio embodies that rare, good-natured cynicism that is endearing rather than estranging, and it allows for moments of earthy beauty, such as the speaker’s constant compulsion to resolve substantial issues with substances—maybe she just needs “a different leave-in conditioner,” as one poem suggests.

As much as I appreciate Exit Opera thematically and stylistically, it is a little one-note for a collection this long. Moments of warmth are so rare that Addonizio’s use of violence as shorthand for angst feels almost flippant—as if readers are meant to be shocked that she isn’t shocked. More importantly, violence begins to feel less like a theme and more like a template, not quite focused enough to serve as emergent form.

Maybe that’s Addonizio’s point—all of this existential dread gets pretty banal the more we entertain it. I just wish the book didn’t feel the same way.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than Meh, but once you've listened to "Roadhouse Blues" 20 or more times in a row, you can get numb to even a great song. All of these poems have a surface solidity and an accompanying sharp wit that the reader can appreciate, but preferably, in retrospect, in small doses. (Addonizio can sure deliver a wicked line, even if it's a poem you don't particularly like.) That said, late in the collection, in "Predator Report," Addonizio informs us, in what is now become a predictable bitching about mortality sentiment, that "I am here to report // that one way or another, everything gets torn apart."

It was at this point I felt things were just getting too trite. Similar thoughts had shown in nearly every previous poem, but were re-worded or repackaged in more interesting, even darkly funny ways. But I now felt that Addonizio was beginning to cannibalize herself while staring at the bottom of a shot glass at 2 AM with nothing new to say. Interestingly, earlier in the collection, in the lovely "Solace" I held out some hope against hope that some balance, some light, would begin to creep in to these poems. But later, as if reading my mind, in "Cracked Logic," Addonizio rolled out Leonard Cohen's light offering "crack in everything" line, and then dismantled it and then turned out the lights. She has her principles and she sticks to them. Consolations, even at Night gets closer, are at best insubstantial mirages. We all die, disappear, and that's it. "Exit Opera" has No Exit.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe life had gotten so absurd by 2024 that there was nothing left to do but let the madness wash over oneself without expectations of it making any sense. This seems to be the conclusion that Kim Addonizio has reached. Her flights of fancy in this book come even faster and more furiously than in earlier poems of hers I've seen. Contemporary political and cultural references abound, and every point she seems to be making gets undermined before it can settle into place in the text.

Part I contains a lot of self-consciously snarky stuff, but always steered by an expert poet's firm control over the pace of language and an effective exploitation of stream-of-consciousness. Inevitably, out of sheer fairness, Addonizio must carry the attack on meaning over to her own work, accusing herself of "saying many pointless things."

But just when I started to feel her mocking us for taking any of this seriously, the poems "In Assisi" and "This Too Shall Pass" let us know she is not sanguinely facetious. They prepare us for Part II of the book, which concentrates on death and mourning, and Part III, which returns to the absurdity of modern existence but with a veil of regret—or more alliteratively: "the feeling that life is one long accommodation to loss."

Overall, this intense collection paints the portrait of a complex person in complex relationships and a complex nexus of worries about our society.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Too Shall Pass

was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Exit Opera: "Once you escape a / wildfire, / leaving everything behind, a little void appears beneath your heart & / lodges in your ribs. / Again you must wait. If you see lightning, listen for the thunder to tell you / how far // or near you are. When Milton went blind, he felt useless, but then he / decided it was okay / to stand still. To abide. Look at the trees, who are patient, who suffer us to / touch them."

from According to the Buddhists: "that giant bottle of Patrón Silver on top of my fridge is already broken, / even though it's still up there / & yes possibly not for long because it almost falls every time I take down / the blender"

from Upstate: "Nature's a beautiful bitch. / Nightshade along the Hudson & in // an old stone house the floorboards / warp with nostalgia."

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of super atheistic, sarcastic, hedonistic (all of these are neutral or positive attributes) poems about facing the absurdity of the world.

“Let’s eat too much and drink / our faces off; anything else is a waste of time / although time is also hard to understand, / maybe made of quantum bits but maybe not, / flowing or passing, maybe an arrow, maybe / a total delusion like believing in griffins / or lasting justice for the poor.”

“I painted my cave / to make it ready for the next thousand centuries of you.”

“Another day of lying face-down, / trying to transubstantiate some fucked-up feeling into a certified ethical diamond.”

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a little worried about you, Kim Addonizio, but at least you're getting good material.

As always, Addonizio's poems are striking, harsh, and gorgeous. "My Opera" was a favorite, as well as this line from "Existential Voyage": "To remember / that neither despair nor a dearth of taxis can last." Words to live by, truly.

[Lisa O'Rourke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won’t try to expound on the way that she nails ordinary life and the random audacious thoughts that we all have- just know that she is wonderful!!!!!! A book to leave on the nightstand.

[Debs · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 stars

I felt seen by these poems.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kim Addonizio's poetry is full of life in all its joy, pain, drunkenness, frustration, death, and lust and this recent collection is an excellent foray into her work. Recommended.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! Wonderful! Troubling! Moving! A work of genius!