Phoenix Poets (CHUP)
2 total works
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.
Doubles is at once tough-minded and urbane, veering from lyricism to street slang, oscillating with the beat of the American city. As his title suggests, Polito's world is one of doubling, simulation, impersonation, and mimicry--a shrewd vision of urban life.