The stuff of Hollywood /
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,...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Port Townsend, Washington :
Copper Canyon Press,
[2024].
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| Summary: | 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 103 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm. |
| ISBN: | 1556596960 9781556596964 |