Album Notes

Kim Addonizio and Susan Browne are two friends who love tennis (Susan usually wins), delicious food, good wine, and most of all POETRY. We decided to put together this CD to celebrate some of the vices we most enjoy, and got together with producer Dan Stone (www.speakeasyaudio.org) to make it happen. A couple of musicians--Noel Cross on electric and acoustic guitar and ukelele, and Stephen Herrick on sax--helped us out on various cuts, and Kim pretends she can actually play the harmonica on a couple of others. Several pieces are straight spoken word, and we trust they need no accompaniment in order to swing!

Kim is a nationally renowned poet who has won numerous awards and a fair share of notoriety for her pulls-no-punches writing, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her third book of poems was a finalist for the National Book Award. Kim is also co-author, with Dorianne Laux, of THE POET'S COMPANION: A GUIDE TO THE PLEASURES OF WRITING POETRY, published by W.W. Norton. (Norton also published her new collection, WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE.) Kim's books have been reviewed in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere, and her work has been published in leading literary journals, anthologies, and textbooks. She also has a novel, LITTLE BEAUTIES, published by Simon & Schuster (in paper summer 2006). You can read her journal, see her tattoos, and keep up with her touring schedule on her web site at www.kimaddonizio.com


Susan Browne won the Four Way Books Prize for her stellar first collection, BUDDHA'S DOGS--a book that is by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, and simply soulful throughout. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote, "There's a ruthless authenticity-a deep cherishing-in BUDDHA'S DOGS, a splendidly mature first book of poems that is filled with moments of Proustian recall, with the comedy and the anguish, the beauty and the burning of lived experience." Susan's poems have won honors from the River City Writing Awards, the Chester H. Jones Foundation, the National Writers' Union, and the Los Angeles Poetry Festival. She received a Special Mention in the 2005 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and her work has been included in many literary journals and anthologies. She teaches writing at Diablo Valley Community College in California, and is at work on a second poetry collection, LIFE IS TOO HARD, as well as a novel and screenplay.