Hollywood & God

fromHollywood & God . . . this hour I tell you things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I'll tell you. The world is a road under the wall to the church, the world is a church, & the world is a road, & the world is a stone wall. Still, he wanted her the way the Cardinal wanted the Caravaggio, & when the ill-advised possessor of the painting resisted one night Papal Guards searched his house. Of course contraband came to light, some illegal rifles, & when the ill-advised possessor of the painting went to prison the Cardinal got his Caravaggio. But I wasn't a Cardinal, nephew to the Pope, and you you were not a Caravaggio. So I asked you to be in my movie. Hollywood & Godis a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbingeven luridhallucination. From theBaltimore Catechismto the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), 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 & Godis an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious. Praise forDoubles "The poems in this collection are as striking for their language, which reveals a subtle rhetorical intelligence, as for their dramas, which exist in an atmosphere charged with violence. Polito handles his volatile material with an almost ritual caution: an instinct for structure and symmetry guides his descent into the underworld of adulterous betrayal and psychic exposure."New Yorker

Acknowledgments Hollywood Hills Barbara Payton: A Memoir Paris Hilton Calls on Jesus Two or Three Dreams About . . . Mike the Winger Please Refrain From Talking During The Movie Overheard in the Love Hotel New York School Three Horse Operas What a Friend Deep Deuce The Harrowing of Dorchester Confidential Shooting Star Sister Elvis Pacific Coast Highway Spicy Detective Riding with the King The Great Awakening Last Seen Hollywood & God Shame Notes