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Kim Addonizio’s poem “To the woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall” became hugely popular after she wrote it in 2016, with extensive quotes and photographs of its printed form reproduced many times on Instagram and Twitter. It is very easy to see why it hit its mark so soundly. It’s a profound and heartbreaking message of sisterly support, written in the most simple, delicate, breathtaking language:
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to a man you loved opened
them for one you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming- Kim Addonizio
In a later twist, the sort of perfectly meta twist the internet loves, in 2019 a woman named Agnes Frimston read Addonizio’s poem aloud to a real-life woman crying uncontrollably in a toilet stall. The tale of this episode, with the poem at its heart, made a neatly closed circle of sisterly support. It was glorious; little wonder that it touched so many and has become so widely shared.
Like so many people, I was already an Addonizio fan when that poem hit its far wider audience, and I had that curiously proprietorial sense of delight and almost-pride that accompanies the realization that other people are finally realizing a truth you’ve been trying to peddle for years. (You know, a bit like that one time when you watched Breaking Bad way before everyone else and then didn’t quite know how to deal with the fact that every second friend was wearing Walt and Jesse costumes at the next fancy dress party you all attended).
Because to put it simply: Kim Addonizio — I love her. I think she’s got the genius knack of distilling the essence of human emotion into the briefest words, a knack that I as a writer would be humbled to even begin to grasp. She gets it, and her poems tell it.
Born in Washington, educated and now settled in San Francisco, Addonizio is 65 years old and her poems span many decades. She has written extensively about the female experience: about desire, love, sex, and motherhood. She sees through the trees to the dense heartwood and then she spears it and carves it, shaping it within a few well-crafted lines. It is deceptively simple. It is delicious. She gives such happiness with her deft ability to do this, even when the poem is a sad or angry one. Take the first two stanzas of “Ex-Boyfriends”:
They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.- Kim Addonizio
You can see them all in your head now, can’t you? It’s six short lines but it’s every ex-boyfriend you ever had, or your friend had, or your sister had.
Or this, the transcendently beautiful “Stolen Moments”:
What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory — an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge —
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.-Kim Addonizio
We don’t know what happened, who she’s talking about, what it meant, what it was. It’s a short poem, giving little away. And yet we do know. We know the mercilessness of love, that it “travels in and keeps emitting light”. We know that the stolen moments sometimes mean everything, and we know that she knows that, and she has written it so well.
The profundity of poems rests so often in what isn’t said, in the gaps and spaces between the lines, but to do this meaningfully, the lines creating those spaces need to be perfect. I think that Addonizio’s are as close to perfect as any poet’s I have read. Her poems are joyous.
In this strange, febrile, home-centered time her poems are a welcome tether to the things we all experienced before quarantine began, and a hopeful signpost to all the experiences that are yet to come. I recommend them wholeheartedly. And they’re perfect for anyone suffering, as I and so many others have during the lockdown, with a lack of concentration and focus.
If you also like the idea of finding happiness in Addonizio’s lines, my recommendation would be to start with her book “Tell Me”. It’s twenty years old, but it’s a timeless collection of poems and it’s a good example of her at her absolute writing peak.
(Or try, as I sometimes do, the hashtag #kimaddonizio on Instagram, and scroll through page after page of her work set out in squares. It’s a thoroughly modern way to enjoy small doses of the life-enhancer that is her poetry. But you should buy her books too, because she’s worth it).