FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Like Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Robert Polito’s fabulous new book combines prose and poetry to sing out a polymorphous, hydra-headed declaration of independence from identity’s cage. We can’t classify Polito’s thrilling recitatives; we can only surrender to their baroque plainspokenness and their sonorous clarity, which reaches back toward modernist-epic cadences for its grave sea swell. Turn left on Vine; drive down Hollywood until you hit God. I’ll gladly meet Polito, a marvel-maker, at any intersection, at any hour.”
Wayne Koestenbaum

“In the America of these poems, the obsession with celebrity and the yearning toward God constantly threaten to turn into each other. Both, by promising us transcendence, ravage the human spirit. Alongside the glamour of celebrity and God stands the unknowable, tormented figure of the poet’s father, seemingly untouched by either. Somehow Polito manages to be both disabused and hypnotized in this ambitious, eloquent, finally tremendously touching book.”
Frank Bidart

Hollywood & God

Robert Polito

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, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks, and mysteries at the crossroads of American spiritual and media life across a diversity of styles, tones, and eras. 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.

Robert Polito is director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing and professor of writing at The New School. He is the author of Doubles, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Robert Polito is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Lindsay Dawson at (773) 702-1964 or ldawson@press.uchicago.edu

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