22. #PopsugarReadingChallenge: What is This Thing Called Love?

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Another book by an author you read last year
Book: What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems, by Kim Addonizio

I look for two things in poetry: that be understandable, and actually about something. By both measures, I fell in love with Kim Addonizio's poetry the first time I read her "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall." Her love poems are neither sentimental nor cynical: they're intense, sexy, sometimes jaded and regretful. Despite the title, the book is not all love poems: she also has a lot to say about mortality, alcohol, and odd topics like true crime. But nothing tops Addonizio writing about the mixed-up feelings of live, like in her poem "Kisses:"

All the kisses I’ve ever been given, today I feel them on my mouth
And my knees feel them, the reckless ones placed there
through the holes in my jeans while I sat on a car hood
or a broken sofa in somebody’s basement, the way I was
in those days, still amazed that boys and even men would want to
lower their beautiful heads like horses drinking from a river and taste me.

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