Robert Polito_Hollywood & God (Social Commentary) PDF only

88 pages.



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 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.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Split between oddly angled bits of memoir and acts of Hollywood ventriloquy, this second poetry collection from Polito (Doubles) leaps between essays and lyrics, between theology and violence, between tell-alls and persona poems. If only God would save me, Polito writes in the title poem, I would know how to hurt you, with the kind of drama and intimacy that infuses many of the voices here. Even Paris Hilton weighs in on spiritual matters (My God makes me feel good). A story about a starlet who falls into a life of drinking, prostitution and poetry doubles as a sad coming-of-age tale, while Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie mixes interior and exterior voices, joining much in this book that's overheard, quoted and borrowed: love moans through hotel walls, instructions from an astrologer and memorized pieces of the Baltimore Catechism. Confused seekers also abound: a woman who thinks the owlish man she lives with is Bob Dylan; another woman who's conflation of her own face, Elvis and God ends tragically; and a man in search of a tintype of his grandmother that may or may not exist. Three personal essays anchor the poems, each a story about interrogating self and god, whether fallen, falling apart or missing altogether.