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Kim Addonizio & Friends
March 16, 2021 @ 6:00 pm

Kim Addonizio is joined by Brittany Perham, Peter Kline, and Tracey Knapp
celebrating the launch of Kim Addonizio’s new collection
Now We’re Getting Somewhere: Poems
published by W.W. Norton
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world.
Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.
Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.
Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar.
A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, “if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming.”
>What Publishers Weekly has to say about Now We’re Getting Somewhere<
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.
Brittany Perham is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009 to 2011. Her most recent book, Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She is also the author of numerous books and her work may be found in the Bellevue Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Lo-Ball, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.
Peter Kline teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and with Stanford University’s Master of Liberal Arts Program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, his poems have received numerous honors including First Prize in the River Styx International Poetry Contest. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Poetry, Tin House, and many other outlets. He is director of the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon, which he founded in 2012. His newest collection, Mirrorforms, was published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions in the fall of 2019.
Tracey Knapp is a poet living in Berkeley, CA. She works in communications and graphic design.
Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, was published by 42 Miles Press. Tracey has received awards and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Rattle, Five Points, The Hampden Sydney Poetry Review, The New Ohio Review and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has work forthcoming in the anthology Clever Girl: Witty Poetry by Women.
This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation