Hollywood & God (Phoenix Poets)

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from Hollywood & 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 & 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), 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. Praise for Doubles        “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   (20090315)