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Jimmy & Rita
Book by Addonizio, Kim
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
1 person is currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Kim Addonizio
65 books610 followersAuthor 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
August 24, 2017
Needles, seedy bars and broken childhoods connect the lives that Kim Addonizio introduces us to. Noisy shelters, strip joints and cheap rooms with sheets for curtains set the scenes. This is the true world of tough love and futureless dreams. A gripping collection of poems woven from tears and scars.
August 4, 2018
Jimmy and Rita is raw and engaging. It goes quickly, but its intensity and tragic moments persevere. These poems are used as a storytelling device, and their connections to each other make this both unique and intriguing.
July 8, 2007
An amazing novel-in-verse.
So resonant, honest and lucid as to be almost frightening.
Undoubtedly, some savvy producer will one day make "Jimmy and Rita" into a feature film. It has the feel of a great poetry collection and screenplay wrapped into one.
A must read for any admirer of Kim Addonizio's work.
So resonant, honest and lucid as to be almost frightening.
Undoubtedly, some savvy producer will one day make "Jimmy and Rita" into a feature film. It has the feel of a great poetry collection and screenplay wrapped into one.
A must read for any admirer of Kim Addonizio's work.
February 24, 2009
The pieces in this collection tell the story of Rita and Jimmy, a young couple struggling with identity, drugs and sexuality.
The point of view is intriguing, as the voice moves between 1st person/3rd person. There are some beautiful, haunting images.
I would recommend this book to people who do not typically like poetry, as it reads much like a collection of short stories.
The point of view is intriguing, as the voice moves between 1st person/3rd person. There are some beautiful, haunting images.
I would recommend this book to people who do not typically like poetry, as it reads much like a collection of short stories.
May 10, 2015
Gritty and hard but I'll be damned if I didn't shoot it straight, right down my throat.
May 31, 2021
A narrative story, told in verse, about two desperate souls who love each other and who are both fighting the sickness of addiction and poverty. It's a gut punch of a read, a difficult story told beautifully. The less is more vibe you get from each piece in this story works so well and you pray, I think, that someone doesn't try and turn this into a movie or a TV series. The small moments here create a wider canvas than anything else ever could. I took a writing class earlier this year that introduced me to Kim's work and I could not be more grateful.
Here's one of my favorite passages:
He always gets out before dawn,
slips money from their purses,
rides the bus through gray streets
when no one's up-
the world still and peaceful,
not yet the world.
Here's one of my favorite passages:
He always gets out before dawn,
slips money from their purses,
rides the bus through gray streets
when no one's up-
the world still and peaceful,
not yet the world.
March 22, 2025
"Jimmy & Rita" is a brutally beautiful collection that grips you from the first poem and never lets go. Kim Addonizio’s language is sharp and evocative, capturing the lives of two deeply flawed yet achingly human characters caught in a cycle of addiction, longing, and lost dreams. The poems unfold like scenes in a raw, intimate film, each one adding depth to the gritty world Jimmy and Rita inhabit. Despite the despair that permeates their story, there's an undeniable tenderness woven through the wreckage. It’s haunting, heartbreaking, and unforgettable—poetry that leaves a mark.
February 7, 2024
Gritty doesn't do it justice. This book is brutally, despairingly real. Jimmy and Rita take us spiraling down the rabbit hole until we realize it was a drain, and we aren't coming back.
I really like her writing - I give that aspect 4.5. The subject matter, for me, is too depressing and gets 3.0. I need to find a copy of her "My Black Angel".
I really like her writing - I give that aspect 4.5. The subject matter, for me, is too depressing and gets 3.0. I need to find a copy of her "My Black Angel".
February 7, 2020
This book made me very sad, in a painfully beautiful way. Addinizio’s language is lovely. Not my usual fare, but I found myself thinking about Jimmy and Rita, and my own privilege, long after turning the last page.
March 27, 2018
Verse novel. A brutal story about love and addiction.
February 13, 2019
Note (not a review): The title has an ampersand. Jimmy & Rita. It is just missing on Goodreads for some reason.
July 31, 2019
Such a haunting portrait of pain and intimacy.
August 7, 2019
Reminded me of Gifford's Sailor and Lula.
November 13, 2022
a high 3. unsure—read quickly, might need to return for second go-thru
January 28, 2024
A powerful and moving window into other lives, lives riven by misfortune, baleful choices, and the profound indifference of the universe.
August 14, 2014
Remember Kim Addonizio’s verse novel, Jimmy & Rita?
I do! And it’s still “Silk” in my book.
I’ve used it in a couple of my classes at Marist College, and I’ve written about a few of the poems in the collection. I have to be honest; it’s a phenomenal poetry book and a raw and moving verse novel for adults. Even Addonizio’s “sequel” to Jimmy & Rita (BOA Editions, 1997), her novel My Dreams Out in the Street, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) just doesn’t live up to the wonderful language and uncontrived story of her verse novel.
Addonizio’s Jimmy & Rita quickly moves us through the love of two characters, using one- or two-paged poems to tell stories, capture character traits, and convey situations or scenes that deal with Jimmy’s and Rita’s lives. At about midway through the collection, Addonizio places a poem titled “Silk.” In this poem, the poet uses dialogue exclusively between her main characters to reveal a truth of mortality: that no matter who we are or what we do, we will all face death and accept or deny it individually.
The lives of Jimmy and Rita shown throughout Addonizio’s book reveal youth, fearlessness, and spontaneity. However, almost as a slow reprieve amid the surrounding quickness of each “exterior” poem, “Silk” provides us with a longer resonance, an “interior” communication of some mirror images of youth, fearlessness, and spontaneity. “Silk” conveys death, fear, and reflection/contemplation.
We see Jimmy and Rita discussing death, sharing their fear of it, and reflecting on their beliefs in what the “afterlife” means to them. Using lines only of dialogue throughout this poem—which is the only dialogue-only poem of the entire collection—Addonizio captures universal human conditions through the conversation of two lost souls, her main characters.
The poem begins with Jimmy’s question to Rita, “Rita. You ever think about dying?” (line 1). Jimmy is serious even though he has lived his life vicariously up until this point and will continue to do so throughout the rest of the book.
He initiates a conversation with Rita about mortality, subtly admitting his concern for something other than parties, sex, and good times. Here we see seriousness through an intimate, intellectual, and spiritual interaction between the main characters. Rita responds to Jimmy’s question:
I don’t like to. […]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Diane [Rita’s best friend] told me once to imagine a bird holding a silk scarf in its
beak and brushing it across the top of a mountain. As long as it takes the scarf to wear down the mountain, that’s how many times
we come back. (2, 15-18)
Rita shares a profound image and idea with Jimmy as their conversation focuses not only on death and dying but also on the possibility of existence after death. To present these very serious matters of mortality, Addonizio skillfully uses an intimate scene held together by dialogue. If the poet had presented the age-old questions of death and the afterlife amid any of the other poems in her book, it would have been cliché.
Throughout the collection, especially before “Silk,” before we realize that Jimmy and Rita really do have normal, legitimate concerns about life, any mention of dying is skewed with a single voice of fearlessness coming from either Rita or Jimmy.[1]
Even in “Her Voice,” where Rita talks of Jimmy’s restless nights in which “[h]e wakes up […] sure / he’s dying, the air close, / panic making it harder / just to breathe” (12-15), Addonizio captures the fear of mortality almost from afar as Rita witnesses only what she thinks Jimmy feels.
In “Silk” the interaction of Jimmy and Rita is real, so is their conversation about dying and what may lie beyond the physical. They speak to each other, question each other’s beliefs, and come to their own terms, whether it is to accept or deny the inevitable end.
As Jimmy and Rita move closer together on a more intimately spiritual level, the conversation slows; the words are more reserved and polite. Jimmy suggests, “Rita. […] / Let’s not die” (24, 26). Her comforting response, “Go to sleep, baby. We won’t” (27), ends the discourse.
This intertwining of empathy and emotion works because of dialogue. The rhythm slows because of dialogue, and we realize that if two young, careless free spirits ponder the inevitable, we have no choice but to question our own mortality as well.
Addonizio has captured not only the harshness of street life in Jimmy & Rita, but she has also planted a profound sense of spiritual awareness within “Silk,” the book’s core.
If you’ve never read this book, I suggest you read it soon!
[1] This can be seen in “Dead Men,” page 17.
I do! And it’s still “Silk” in my book.
I’ve used it in a couple of my classes at Marist College, and I’ve written about a few of the poems in the collection. I have to be honest; it’s a phenomenal poetry book and a raw and moving verse novel for adults. Even Addonizio’s “sequel” to Jimmy & Rita (BOA Editions, 1997), her novel My Dreams Out in the Street, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) just doesn’t live up to the wonderful language and uncontrived story of her verse novel.
Addonizio’s Jimmy & Rita quickly moves us through the love of two characters, using one- or two-paged poems to tell stories, capture character traits, and convey situations or scenes that deal with Jimmy’s and Rita’s lives. At about midway through the collection, Addonizio places a poem titled “Silk.” In this poem, the poet uses dialogue exclusively between her main characters to reveal a truth of mortality: that no matter who we are or what we do, we will all face death and accept or deny it individually.
The lives of Jimmy and Rita shown throughout Addonizio’s book reveal youth, fearlessness, and spontaneity. However, almost as a slow reprieve amid the surrounding quickness of each “exterior” poem, “Silk” provides us with a longer resonance, an “interior” communication of some mirror images of youth, fearlessness, and spontaneity. “Silk” conveys death, fear, and reflection/contemplation.
We see Jimmy and Rita discussing death, sharing their fear of it, and reflecting on their beliefs in what the “afterlife” means to them. Using lines only of dialogue throughout this poem—which is the only dialogue-only poem of the entire collection—Addonizio captures universal human conditions through the conversation of two lost souls, her main characters.
The poem begins with Jimmy’s question to Rita, “Rita. You ever think about dying?” (line 1). Jimmy is serious even though he has lived his life vicariously up until this point and will continue to do so throughout the rest of the book.
He initiates a conversation with Rita about mortality, subtly admitting his concern for something other than parties, sex, and good times. Here we see seriousness through an intimate, intellectual, and spiritual interaction between the main characters. Rita responds to Jimmy’s question:
I don’t like to. […]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Diane [Rita’s best friend] told me once to imagine a bird holding a silk scarf in its
beak and brushing it across the top of a mountain. As long as it takes the scarf to wear down the mountain, that’s how many times
we come back. (2, 15-18)
Rita shares a profound image and idea with Jimmy as their conversation focuses not only on death and dying but also on the possibility of existence after death. To present these very serious matters of mortality, Addonizio skillfully uses an intimate scene held together by dialogue. If the poet had presented the age-old questions of death and the afterlife amid any of the other poems in her book, it would have been cliché.
Throughout the collection, especially before “Silk,” before we realize that Jimmy and Rita really do have normal, legitimate concerns about life, any mention of dying is skewed with a single voice of fearlessness coming from either Rita or Jimmy.[1]
Even in “Her Voice,” where Rita talks of Jimmy’s restless nights in which “[h]e wakes up […] sure / he’s dying, the air close, / panic making it harder / just to breathe” (12-15), Addonizio captures the fear of mortality almost from afar as Rita witnesses only what she thinks Jimmy feels.
In “Silk” the interaction of Jimmy and Rita is real, so is their conversation about dying and what may lie beyond the physical. They speak to each other, question each other’s beliefs, and come to their own terms, whether it is to accept or deny the inevitable end.
As Jimmy and Rita move closer together on a more intimately spiritual level, the conversation slows; the words are more reserved and polite. Jimmy suggests, “Rita. […] / Let’s not die” (24, 26). Her comforting response, “Go to sleep, baby. We won’t” (27), ends the discourse.
This intertwining of empathy and emotion works because of dialogue. The rhythm slows because of dialogue, and we realize that if two young, careless free spirits ponder the inevitable, we have no choice but to question our own mortality as well.
Addonizio has captured not only the harshness of street life in Jimmy & Rita, but she has also planted a profound sense of spiritual awareness within “Silk,” the book’s core.
If you’ve never read this book, I suggest you read it soon!
[1] This can be seen in “Dead Men,” page 17.
Read
January 21, 2012Whitman's famous proclamation "Through me the many long dumb voices," depending on how it strikes the ear, echoes either with self-aggrandizement, a song that appropriates everything within shouting distance to swell its own puny notes, or with self-erasure, negative capability yawped with a barbarously American accent. The latter inflects the various voices of JIMMY & RITA, the second full-length collection by Kim Addonizio, whose THE PHILOSOPHER'S won the 1994 Great Lakes' New Writer Award. In this new volume, a verse novel, Addonizio acts as a postmodern aeolian harp, stirred to music by the stories of two eponymous lovers from our mostly unheard and invisible underclass. The most tragic aspect of the fifty-five poems lies in the fact that both Rita and Jimmy know themselves only by their failures, foremost among them the various failures of their love. Thus, it's a triumphant, terrible paradox that Addonizio gives voices and identities to her self-negated "characters" with such lavish clarity that they quickly become "real people," but merely to readers, never to themselves.
JIMMY & RITA, whose lives include heroin, theft, drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness, have existed since childhood in a painful, noisy place created by the disharmonies of dream and injury. Although the couple's milieu becomes an extreme of the American nightmare, the space in which they love and suffer, as children and adults, is large enough to contain us all. In "Portrait," for example, we're told that Rita, the oldest of seven kids, "used to hide / from the noise in the house -- / sliding down in the bathtub, / warm water in her ears," and "if she hummed / her head filled up with music." Her father, a door-to-door portraitist employed by Golden West Photography, mainly photographs the family he later abandons: "Rita has pictures / of herself at every age to twelve / in front of a velvet backdrop, / holding the latest baby, / smiling to please him." Jimmy describes a fist-ready and boozy dad who, among other cruelties, feeds his son beer and laughs when he falls over furniture or vomits. Nonetheless, like Rita, like any normal child, Jimmy hungers for his father's approval: "Sometimes I'd sit up / at night in the garage and watch / how he drank it, tipping his head / way back, and I'd try to drink mine exactly the same, / but quietly, so he wouldn't notice and send me away." Rita believes she'll be loved if she is quiet and pretty; Jimmy's credo includes invisibility and strength, or at least being needed. After the couple is married and Jimmy loses his job, he wakes in the middle of the night and wants to hit Rita, "lying there curled / toward the window. / Just once, / hard, so she'd cry out / and he could comfort her."
In the hands of a lesser poet, the subject matter of JIMMY & RITA might have prompted what Jarrell called "a mooing awe for the common man." That obsequious and typically American awe, which sounds its moo when Whitman goes off-key, swells unchecked in the work of many contemporary poets, "compassion" now a loftier buzzword than any praiseful term for imagery, music, or even intelligence. While, obviously, technical brilliance fails to move us when unwedded to larger urgencies, an eleventh commandment should forbid exploiting subjects to display one's inherent or achieved sensitivity to suffering. The full achievement of JIMMY & RITA is greater than I have space to discuss, but Addonizio's cinematic use of shifting points of view and voice-overs is enormously effective; and her speedy, jazzily syncopated free verse in the third-person narratives and dramatic monologues, combined with her tersely astute prose poems, establishes her as a virtuoso of the craft just as surely as her characters prove her a fearless explorer of the most brutal, and often unsung, regions of the human heart.
(originally published in PLOUGHSHARES)
JIMMY & RITA, whose lives include heroin, theft, drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness, have existed since childhood in a painful, noisy place created by the disharmonies of dream and injury. Although the couple's milieu becomes an extreme of the American nightmare, the space in which they love and suffer, as children and adults, is large enough to contain us all. In "Portrait," for example, we're told that Rita, the oldest of seven kids, "used to hide / from the noise in the house -- / sliding down in the bathtub, / warm water in her ears," and "if she hummed / her head filled up with music." Her father, a door-to-door portraitist employed by Golden West Photography, mainly photographs the family he later abandons: "Rita has pictures / of herself at every age to twelve / in front of a velvet backdrop, / holding the latest baby, / smiling to please him." Jimmy describes a fist-ready and boozy dad who, among other cruelties, feeds his son beer and laughs when he falls over furniture or vomits. Nonetheless, like Rita, like any normal child, Jimmy hungers for his father's approval: "Sometimes I'd sit up / at night in the garage and watch / how he drank it, tipping his head / way back, and I'd try to drink mine exactly the same, / but quietly, so he wouldn't notice and send me away." Rita believes she'll be loved if she is quiet and pretty; Jimmy's credo includes invisibility and strength, or at least being needed. After the couple is married and Jimmy loses his job, he wakes in the middle of the night and wants to hit Rita, "lying there curled / toward the window. / Just once, / hard, so she'd cry out / and he could comfort her."
In the hands of a lesser poet, the subject matter of JIMMY & RITA might have prompted what Jarrell called "a mooing awe for the common man." That obsequious and typically American awe, which sounds its moo when Whitman goes off-key, swells unchecked in the work of many contemporary poets, "compassion" now a loftier buzzword than any praiseful term for imagery, music, or even intelligence. While, obviously, technical brilliance fails to move us when unwedded to larger urgencies, an eleventh commandment should forbid exploiting subjects to display one's inherent or achieved sensitivity to suffering. The full achievement of JIMMY & RITA is greater than I have space to discuss, but Addonizio's cinematic use of shifting points of view and voice-overs is enormously effective; and her speedy, jazzily syncopated free verse in the third-person narratives and dramatic monologues, combined with her tersely astute prose poems, establishes her as a virtuoso of the craft just as surely as her characters prove her a fearless explorer of the most brutal, and often unsung, regions of the human heart.
(originally published in PLOUGHSHARES)
May 12, 2014
Unlike many verse novels, this stands up as poetry. At less than 90 pages, the story is a thin slice of the lives of Rita and Jimmy, who live hard lives, love each other while moving closer and further apart. Fans of Ellen Hopkins may move onto this eventually, but Addonizio isn't as generous with narrative. Hopkins tells a story; Addonizio hints at hers. Readers have to connect the dots, piecing together the story from bits and shards.
The explicit nature of the book will make it unlikely for most High School collections, but fans of gritty love stories may find this one worth investigating to see what a gifted poet can do.
The explicit nature of the book will make it unlikely for most High School collections, but fans of gritty love stories may find this one worth investigating to see what a gifted poet can do.
February 27, 2010
2/2010: Do you know how much I love this? I can't even begin to tell you what "good" poetry is or isn't. I just know this touched me deeply, and that's "good" enough for me.
2/2010: Finally got it!!! Woot! Squee! And all other internet expressions of joy!
11/2008: I WANT this book!!!!! I heard one of the poems ("Shelter") on the Writer's Almanac on NPR and was totally devastated by it.
Did I say I MUST have this book????
2/2010: Finally got it!!! Woot! Squee! And all other internet expressions of joy!
11/2008: I WANT this book!!!!! I heard one of the poems ("Shelter") on the Writer's Almanac on NPR and was totally devastated by it.
Did I say I MUST have this book????
June 5, 2012
This 2000 volume of poetry was a finalist for the National Book Award and I can see why.
It is a book-length study of a couple of lovers, working-class and very poor. A portrait
of the sometimes limited options for under-educated young people. It is cinematic in scope
as every detail feels palpable and vividly present. Quite a feat I think to sustain such
effort throughout the young trajectory of these two lives.
It is a book-length study of a couple of lovers, working-class and very poor. A portrait
of the sometimes limited options for under-educated young people. It is cinematic in scope
as every detail feels palpable and vividly present. Quite a feat I think to sustain such
effort throughout the young trajectory of these two lives.
December 20, 2012
I think I've now read every book of poetry by this wise, fearless chronicler of the blues. If there's one I've missed, I'll go get it.
These are characters we love for all their flaws, and root for, and watch make bad choices, and yet we turn the page and want more. I can't think of another poet writing today who makes me yearn so deeply for her subjects' redemption, however small or short-lived it may be.
These are characters we love for all their flaws, and root for, and watch make bad choices, and yet we turn the page and want more. I can't think of another poet writing today who makes me yearn so deeply for her subjects' redemption, however small or short-lived it may be.
August 11, 2008
She's an amazing writer who is not afraid of risks (all types). This book just isn't my favorite. Perhaps it's just the subject matter is hard for me to take...but I don't think that's the reason (look at what else I read...).
Maybe I need to re-read it and re-assess the poems and the narrative. I really enjoy most of her work.
Maybe I need to re-read it and re-assess the poems and the narrative. I really enjoy most of her work.
July 22, 2008
This cycle of poems tells a somewhat interesting, somewhat banal story of an obviously doomed relationship. As poetry I wasn't that impressed. I think this would have made a better novel than a book of poems.
October 13, 2007
This is a brutal little story in verse about two herion-addicted alcoholics in love.
November 9, 2015
Jimmy & Rita is a gritty and raw verse novel. Some of my favorite moments include:
December
Dancing
Spin
What Happened
Party
Blackberry
Smaller Each Day
December
Dancing
Spin
What Happened
Party
Blackberry
Smaller Each Day
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews