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Title details for The Stuff of Hollywood by Niki Herd - Available

The Stuff of Hollywood

by Niki Herd
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In The Stuff of Hollywood, the camera is both a witness of truths and an instrument capturing the line between real and engineered violence.

The Stuff of Hollywood is a meditation on the pervasiveness of violence in America. In this book-length poem, Niki Herd relies on various modes—images, prose, lyric and documentary poems—to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest. A busy Waffle House, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, inside an Uber on a Chicago street, readers are placed in various "film" locations and watch as America becomes a character in its own absurd movie. In one section, excerpted language from the continuity script of D.W. Griffith's 1915 The Birth of a Nation is juxtaposed with text from the January 6 congressional hearings, suggesting a fragile line between real and engineered brutality. Herd interrogates empire and the ways in which violence is consumed and normalized. The Stuff of Hollywood is an elegy for a country that never existed beyond the screen.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 20, 2024

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781619322936

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781619322936
      • File size: 9057 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      Starred review from August 1, 2024
      The Stuff of Hollywood moves like a reel of film, 24 frames per second. Is it a nine o'clock news story? Is it the latest action blockbuster, full of Hollywood's ubiquitous violence? Herd's poem is book-length. It has to be, and it is powerful and evocative to its last beating line. Her disciplined approach to structure holds tension from start to finish. We see her child self "in violent white / patent leather shoes, a starched dress so pastel pastel." A religious holiday is surrendered before a Hollywood classic, The Ten Commandments. Herd's focus sharpens with each successive chronicling of America's historical obsession with violence, real and imagined. As she contemplates police reports and a museum exhibiting remnants of the gazebo where Tamir Rice was murdered, she observes, "the criminal justice system is little less than a postmodern auction block." Using photographs to propel her breathless narrative, Herd's pace can sting as she considers America's chronicle of violence from the silent film The Birth of a Nation to January 6. As both poet and witness, Herd seeks healing or, at least, a salve. Her long poem concludes, "It's a heart mourning its own enclosure.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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