Scary Movies comes from Kim Addonizo's collection, What Is This Thing Called Love, which Publishers Weekly called, ...two parts confessional, one part stand-up comedy, and one part talking blues.
Kim Addonizio's exacting and realistic poetry, observational in its eye for detail, is exceptionally astute about the absurdity of human relationships.
Even outside of Scary Movies, Ms. Addonizio's poetry has a certain cinematic quality; as in her breathlessly paced poem, In Dreams:
He's not in the crooked houses I wander through
or in the field by the highway
where I'm running, chasing down
some important piece of paper
Scary Movies, Ghosts and Monsters
In the opening lines of Scary Movies, the poet conjures up childhood fears in ways that portend an ominous future:
Today the cloud shapes are terrifying...
Ms. Addonizio skillfully builds tension from imagery that initially seems quite simple, but will lead to a revelation that is both unpredictable and disturbing; propelled by a monster, that the poet imagines will...
...drag me from my kitchen
to the deep cave...
...a cave that holds metaphorical bones that litter the mind, and congest the human spirit; restricting the fearless and naive wanderlust that once seemed so limitless; leading the haunted mind back to adulthood, where the dark shadows hide frights unfathomable to a child:
...on those days when it seems like death
It is here, after the poet has elevated the level of anxiety, that the reader is shocked back to reality; as Addonizio dazzles the reader with a sequence that begins with a ghostly voice on an answering machine:
Hi, I'm not here-
the morning of her funeral,
the calls filling up the tape...
In the end, the poet observes, the dead really do haunt, even when you've long outgrown the scary movies that kept you awake in your youth.
...rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee...
And it seems that it is in this moment, that the most frightening realization of all settles into the adult psyche: monsters in reality are far more terrifying than the ones found in scary movies.
Exorcism of Demons Past
What Kim Addonizio accomplishes through her poem, better than many film critics, is to uncover the psychological and emotional catharsis inherent in scary movies. Much as Blues music wrings the sadness and heartbreak out of human relationships for a listener; so too, scary movies exorcise the anxiety and fear, of death, violence, and psychosis.
And of course, Scary Movies is also a lovely poem about how an emotionally fragile person (who has seen too many horror films) deals with the death of a friend.
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