“What Do Women Want?” by Kim Addonizio appears in the poet’s collection, Tell Me, published by BOA Editions in 2000. The collection is Addonizio’s third and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The poem is written in free verse in one continuous stanza of 27 lines.

Its title borrowing from the question famously posed by Sigmund Freud, the poem provides a declarative answer: The speaker wants a red dress. The garment is not haute couture but inexpensive and sexy—a dress to make a woman stand out on a midday street among the shopkeepers and laborers.

Beyond its eye-catching color and body conscious fit, the dress represents more to the speaker than simple attention. It broadcasts an individual spirit determined to experience the primacy of desire, as well as all the love and pain of a life fully embodied.

Poet Biography

Poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer Kim Addonizio was born in Washington DC in 1954 to tennis champion Pauline Betz and sportswriter Bob Addie. Addonizio earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from San Francisco State University and has made the Bay Area her home for most of her life.

Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections as well two novels, two short story collections, and the memoir, Bukowski in a Sun Dress: Confessions from a Writing Life (2016). Her bibliography includes two books on writing poetry: Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within (2009); and The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997), with Dorianne Laux. The poet produced two CDs of spoken word poetry, one in 2011 and another in 2015.

Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for Tell Me (2000).

Urban grittiness and sharp wit distinguish the speakers in Addonizio’s poetry. Persistent themes include love, sex, family, and death. The work bears the influence of blues music and an ear finely attuned to street life and working-class concerns. Although the poet balks at the labeling of her poetry as Confessional, her poems often address the reader directly and with an accessibility and intimacy that reveals the hard truths and aspirations of their speakers.

Regarding the process of writing poetry, Addonizio says, “There are only two useful rules I can think of for aspiring writers: learn your craft, and persist. The rest, as Henry James said, is the madness of art” (Poetry Foundation).

Poem Text

Addonizio, Kim. “What Do Women Want?” 2000. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The title of the poem, “What Do Women Want?” allows the speaker to dive cleanly into the answer: “I want a red dress” (Line 1). She doesn’t want a fancy dress but one that is “flimsy and cheap” (Line 2). It should show plenty of skin and leave nothing to the imagination when she walks through the neighborhood past the drugstore and the butcher.

The speaker wants to stand out, to feel powerful in her ability to arouse desire. The dress would make her feel unique, like “the only / woman on earth” (Lines 14-15). She does not yet own it but yearns for it as something that would free her to live as the openly passionate person she feels herself to be, beyond caring what others think of her.

In the last seven lines of the poem, the dress takes on more significance. It is “a body / to carry [the speaker] into this world” (Lines 23-24). The dress will become indistinguishable from the speaker herself, as she will “wear it like bones, like skin” (Line 25). It will continue to represent the speaker, even in death.