Kim Addonizio

Struggling with her divorce and an alcoholic mother while working at a Long Beach baby store, former child pageant contender Diana McBride becomes involved with a pregnant teen who wants to give her baby up for adoption.

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. 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 self-doubt and writer's block - are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

A reimagining of the world-famous Indian epic, the Mahabharat--told from the point of view of the wife of an amazing woman.Relevant to today's war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale. The novel traces the princess Panchaali's life, beginning with her birth in fire and following her spirited balancing act as a woman with five husbands who have been cheated out of their father's kingdom. Panchaali is swept into their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war involving all the important kings of India. Meanwhile, we never lose sight of her strategic duels with her mother-in-law, her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna, or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy. Panchaali is a fiery female redefining for us a world of warriors, gods, and the ever-manipulating hands of fate.

102 pages ; 22 cm

"These gutsy and postfeminist stories will elicit the shock of recognition from women and may reveal to men something about the further regions of the female psyche."--BOOK JACKET. "By turns graphic, funny, and moving, the urban tales present characters who are teetering on the edge. Indifferent or absent lovers, drinking and smoking too much, loneliness, paranoia, a desire that is always fresh in spite of the facts, rage, and obsession - this is the macabre landscape of these very unusual and unrestrained stories."--BOOK JACKET. "In "Reading Sontag," Addonizio invades and recasts Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination" while describing a monumentally failed relationship. In "The Gift," a woman finds a dildo on the street and is magically transformed into a man."--BOOK JACKET.

"One the province of sailors and bikers, tattoos have emerged from backdoor parlors to suburban shopping malls. Today they adorn starlets' ankles, housewives' shoulders, and bankers' biceps. Fashionable? Most definitely, Respectable? Not always. Evocative, transformative, still dangerous? Just ask many of our most gifted writers across several colorful decades, who have found the images of the tattoo needle a vivid subject for the language of the pen. Brought to you by two editors who are themselves widely praised (and proudly tattooed) authors, these stories, poems, and memoirs span the range of human experience, from the awesome to the absurd. From Flannery O'Connor's likeness of God to Sylvia Plath's fifteen-dollar eagle, from Herman Melville's power of the primitive to Mark Doty's embrace of the ineradicable to Franz Kafka's lasting mark of the penal colony, this bold exploration of the illuminated body is guaranteed to get under your skin."--BOOK JACKET.

Inspired by the gratifying success of The Poet's Companion, Kim Addonizio presents exciting new insights into the creative process, craft, and the lessons of her own creative journey. Poetry's time-honored subjects—love, loss, identity, community—are here, along with a heady variety of writing exercises (and innovative ways to use the Internet). Chapters on gender, race, and class challenge readers to explore their creative vision more deeply. Addonizio, hailed for her passionate, award-winning poetry, shares her breakthroughs and frustrations frankly, including samples of rejection slips. She offers not only encouragement but also a wealth of knowledge about form and structure, metaphor and rhythm, revision, and that elusive goal: publishing. "Poetry is not a means to an end," Addonizio maintains, "but a continuing engagement with being alive." Her generous guide is for beginners and experienced poets, for groups and in the classroom—indeed for anyone eager to glimpse the angel of poetry.

“There is a correlation between the richness of the reading environment in which readers live and the richness of their talk about what they've read.” “In any group of children we find that if they begin by sharing their most obvious observations they soon accumulate a body of understanding that reveals the heart of a text and its meaning(s) for them all.” Talking about a book helps a child find the heart of a story, make sense of a string of facts, and understand complicated ideas. Aidan Chambers proposes an approach for discussing books so children learn to talk well about what they've read. Indeed, not only talk well, but listen well. And not just about books, but about other things. For the “Tell me” approach ultimately helps children learn to clarify ideas for themselves and to communicate with others. It is, in short, a basic step in applying knowledge and articulating meaning. Tell Me offers practical information about book talking in the classroom, explaining some of the processes and outlining the ground rules developed by teachers and others who work with children and books. From their experience he has formulated a Framework, “a repertoire of questions that assist readers in speaking out their reading.”

"A no-holds-barred, dark, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world. An essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kal-sarika nnit-drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out-Now We're Getting Somewhere charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Dorothy Parker, John Keats, Outlander, semiotics, and more. The poems are sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, weaving from desolation to drollery. A poet whose "voice lifts from the page, alive and biting" (San Francisco Book Review), Kim Addonizio reminds her reader, "If you think nothing and no one can / listen I love you joy is coming.""--

"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 for Penthouse. 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"--