Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio has received two NEA Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal. She is the author of three books of poetry from BOA Editions. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, and Penthouse, and in several anthologies including The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Catholic Girls, A New Geography of Poets, and It’s Only Rock and Roll.
In the Box Called Pleasure
Kim Addonizio’s fearless, original voice is simultaneously edgy and tender, dark and light. She writes sensitively and intelligently about sex and the human condition, with a clear and lucid eye.
In the Box Called Pleasure
Kim Addonizio
1999
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-081-5
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.
By turns graphic and funny, these urban tales present characters who are teetering on the edge. Indifferent or absent lovers, too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, obsession, paranoia, a desire that is always fresh in spite of the facts-this is the macabre landscape of these very unusual and unrestrained works.
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.
This book is the unique product of a poet with a gift for a kind of fiction that is full of formal bravado, strange incident, and a stranger but very human pathos. These are fictions to prepare us for the real millennium.
Addonizio braves Mary Gaitskill’s stomping ground, sketching portraits of troubled women who mistake a semblance of sexual chemistry for love and pay a dear price for their error in judgment.
It is impossible to read In the Box Called Pleasure and not admire Kim Addonizio.