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Box Office Gospel: Poems

Box Office Gospel: Poems
By author: Marissa Glover
Product Code: P664
ISBN: 9780881468762
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Availability: In stock
Price: $20.00

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Marissa Glover once again addresses herself, with her signature wit and moxie, to matters political and personal, sacred and profane, in a voice at once disarmingly colloquial and slyly erudite. Varying tonal registers with an easy grace, she ranges freely over national affairs of great historical importance and tiny, shrewdly observed incidents from domestic life. Above all, the poems chronicle the most vital and abiding forms of societal interrelation--between mothers and sons, husbands and wives, leaders and their people, if not even, on the grandest of scales, gods and their children. Biblical and literary characters keep company with contemporary pop culture icons and news figures ripped from yesterday's headlines. As the book title suggests, Glover takes special aim at the distinctly American pantheon of cinematic celebrities, whose various longings and foibles have come to form a kind of shared cultural vocabulary with which to interpret, and communicate, our own off-screen travails. But unlike Hollywood, Glover tends to see a third way. Existing somewhere between hero and villain, her poems' speakers march on despite all that they rightly identify as nasty, silly, or simply disappointing about people and the world. Glover makes no compromises with the objects of her scrutiny, yet never descends to despair. Whether pointing her finger, rolling her eyes, or simply shaking her head, the author expresses sentiments at once timely and timeless with lyrical elegance and bracing candor. Even with a heavy heart, she lifts our spirits.
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Reviews

Review by: Katie Manning, author of TASTY OTHER - January 2, 2023
"Reading Marissa Glover's collection feels like having the best kind of conversation with a close friend. Here we can move fluidly between discussing Wonder Woman and Han Solo to current politics and social issues to biblical stories and church attendance because they all tie together in the flow of these poems. We can laugh together, sometimes right after we've discussed something very serious, maybe especially because we've discussed something serious and we need to laugh. I needed this book."
Review by: Jack B. Bedell, author of AGAINST THE WOODS' DARK TRUNKS; and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019 - January 2, 2023
"There's no telling how many times I've purchased a movie ticket just for the joy of sinking into a soft chair in a big, dark room to get away from whatever's going on outside. Many of those times, though, the movies held such power that they brought the real world into sharper focus and altered how I walked back out into it. That's exactly how Marissa Glover's new collection affects me. These poems help us all see the world as it is, with its broken hearts, its tumors, its ugly politics, its war. Each page here offers us the saviors our fragile world needs today. Most importantly, these poems make us know we can be right there with them in the fight. And I can't think of a more valuable gift a poem, or a poet, could give us in these times.
Review by: Shawn Berman, author of MR. FUNNYMAN - January 2, 2023
"Lights, camera, action! Marissa Glover's latest collection brilliantly mixes pop culture with pathos and throws us into a world that only she could craft, giving us something to admire on every page. Simply put: Marissa Glover's BOX OFFICE GOSPEL deserve its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

Goodreads reviews