Kim Addonizio's 31-Year Old Lover

In Kim Addonizio's poem “31-Year Old Lover”, Addonizio introduces two characters, a 31-year old man, and an older woman. Through these characters, Addonizio attempts to portray youthfulness as a godlike state, by contrasting it with the process of becoming old and weary. At the start of Addonizio's poem, the main character, or the man, is the center of attention. Addonizio characterizes him as “A stick of butter being unwrapped, the milky, lubricious smoothness.....his body is hard, the high tight pectorals, the new dimes of the nipples pressed into his chest, the fanning of the muscle underneath.”(Addonizio 25). Addonizio's description serves as a glorification of the man, along with his youth. She compares him to a “stick of butter being
She describes the man, who does not realize his eventual loss of youth as “[having] no idea, as I had no idea.”(Addonizio 25). The main character seems to believe that her loss of youth went unnoticed, just as this man's will. However, in her tone of speech she seems to describe that perhaps her youth went unnoticed, because she was so stuck in this godlike state she believes was and still is youth. In a sense, Addonizio attempts to show that perhaps the loss of a glorified state of life, youth in this case, goes unnoticed until treated with something vile. She bolsters this idea, when she describes herself as wanting her youth back from this man, “I am going to let him stretch out on my bad so I can take the heavy richness of him in and in. I am going to have it back the only way I can.”(Addonizio). This final moment, of the woman's lust for youth, depicts the glorification of being young; of how appealing it is compared to being old, of having your skin loose and your hair wiry. The fact that this woman is making an attempt to regain it, to reforge the lost youth inside of her, serves to show how powerful and magnificent the thirst for youth is, once