Welcome to Kathryn Grays Hollywood or Home, a poetry collection with as much ruthless glamour as any Old Hollywood movie. These worldly-wise poems explore celebrity culture in a mode that is both seriously playful and playfully serious. Here, melancholy and humour, irony and sincerity can be often found in the same poem, creating a rich experience for the film buff or fan of celebrity culture, as the book is full of easter eggs and movie references.Spectres of Hollywood haunt the collection: moguls, politicians, starlets, and monsters. They leap from screen and stage to page, as in Portrait of my Superego as Mommie Dearest: youre / the one swinging the axe, Mommie. Famous actors drop in to entertain, for example in Meryl Streep is my Therapist or Six Ways of Looking at John Cazale, while writers do their best to pitch their best ideas, working hard to convince: Its "relatable". / Its really "relatable" stuff (High-concept). Film memorabilia is explored, like The Deer Hunter s bandana, as well as movie-business secrets: the title of As told by Alan Smithee refers to the alter ego that directors use in movie credits when they want to disown their films.Stock characters and plots show up, like the Handome Weeping Boy, and The Meet-Cute, that scene in a romantic comedy where a couple have a first hilarious or cute meeting. Classic 1980s movies like Pretty in Pink and Top Gun make their cameos. Power couples take their place, like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner in Night and Day, 1957, and melodrama heightens to Douglas Sirks grand levels in Love. All the stories and characters loom larger than life, and as the narrator asks, contemplating celebrity Tweets in Fresh Hell, Why cant life be EVERYTHING IN CAPS LIKE CHER?.In decadent celebrity culture, where a star is born every minute and becomes a flop even more quickly, these fierce and funny poems open space for the writer to reassess failures and successes, to overcome writers block, and to remember that we never stop longing for our old dreams to come true. Gray is writing at the top of her game with her much-anticipated second collection. Out of Hollywoods brutal disdain for failure, Gray manages to find spectacle – and survival.Grays long-awaited second collection both celebrates and accuses the glamour and imagination of the movies in particular, and of art in general. Whether its Meryl Streep or Ferris Bueller or John Cazale shes writing of, Gray is illuminating, funny, and frequently moving. Underpinning the comedy and satire, though, is a real pain at lifes jolts and times relentlessness: "What happened to the script?", Nick Laird, author of Feel FreeHollywood or Home shines a light on the filmic quality of daily life, reminding us just how thin the membrane between fiction and reality can be. Within its pages we encounter the Mind in various guises: as an invalid from the nineteenth century, a rain-streaked window-pane and (my favourite) a cabinet populated by indescribable figurines. Bristling with energy, humour and kick-ass bravura, at the same time these poems tremble with deeply felt emotion. - Julia Copus, author of Girlhood
