Bukowski in a Sundress

<b>Somewhere between Jo Ann Beard's <i>The Boys of My Youth</i> and Amy Schumer's stand-up exists Kim Addonizio's style of storytelling . . . at once biting and vulnerable nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality. <i><b>--Refinery29</b></i> <p/>Always vital clever and seductive Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham. <i>--<b>Booklist</b></i> <p/>A dazzling edgy laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing drinking dating and more</b><br> <b> </b><br> 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. <p/> 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 <i>Penthouse</i>. <p/> 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.