Box Office Gospel

Marissa Glover addresses herself, with 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.

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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.