Bukowski in a sundress: confessions from a writing life

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 roadfrom 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 forPenthouse.

At once intimate and outrageous, Addonizio's memoir radiates all the wit and heartbreak and ever-sexy grittiness that her fans have come to loveand that new readers will not soon forget.From the Trade Paperback edition.