Description
Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing - even lurid-hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.
About the Author
Robert Polito is president of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. He is the author of Doubles, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He was director of the New School Graduate Writing Program, and he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of novelist Jim Thompson, Savage Art.
Reviews
"Hollywood & God could have been called American Dirt; it could have been called Wrong Turns. A reader will find his or her own titles, because almost everything here-'Riding with the King' picking up Huckleberry Finn, 'Overheard in the Love Hotel' summoning Elvis Presley, 'The Great Awakening' calling Jonathan Edwards up on stage with T. D. Rice-is emblematic. Emblematic, but also whispering, as if to say, 'First impressions are always wrong.' This is a book full of people hiding behind their own names: a book of surprises." (Greil Marcus) "Split between oddly angled bits of memoir and acts of Hollywood ventriloquy, this second poetry collection from Robert Polito leaps between essays and lyrics, between theology and violence, between tell-alls and persona poems.... Three personal essays anchor the poems, each a story about interrogating self and god, whether fallen, falling apart, or missing altogether." (Publishers Weekly)"
Book Information
ISBN 9780226103655
Author Robert Polito
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 142g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 16mm * 1mm
About the Author
Robert Polito is president of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. He is the author of Doubles, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He was director of the New School Graduate Writing Program, and he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of novelist Jim Thompson, Savage Art.
Reviews
"Hollywood & God could have been called American Dirt; it could have been called Wrong Turns. A reader will find his or her own titles, because almost everything here-'Riding with the King' picking up Huckleberry Finn, 'Overheard in the Love Hotel' summoning Elvis Presley, 'The Great Awakening' calling Jonathan Edwards up on stage with T. D. Rice-is emblematic. Emblematic, but also whispering, as if to say, 'First impressions are always wrong.' This is a book full of people hiding behind their own names: a book of surprises." (Greil Marcus) "Split between oddly angled bits of memoir and acts of Hollywood ventriloquy, this second poetry collection from Robert Polito leaps between essays and lyrics, between theology and violence, between tell-alls and persona poems.... Three personal essays anchor the poems, each a story about interrogating self and god, whether fallen, falling apart, or missing altogether." (Publishers Weekly)"
Book Information
ISBN 9780226103655
Author Robert Polito
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 142g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 16mm * 1mm
