The Stuff of Hollywood - Paperback

by Niki Herd (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Niki Herd is the author ofThe Stuff of Hollywood, The Language of Shedding Skin, and the chapbook don't you weep. She also co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd's poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University.