Hollywood Forever

by Harmony Holiday

Holiday curates poems-as-text and image-as-impression, lyricism and activism. The "legacies" of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday and other icons collide, harnessing taboos they upheld triumphantly. Layers of a story coalesce in restricted space producing ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies. The New Mythology Begins to Love me With an immediacy that seems at once artless and profoundly sophisticated. You know how Billie Holiday sounds vague and precise like an unmarked grave that might your father's but he had another name for his disappearance, he called it love eventfully shattered with enough of it I heard black people don't get depressed, besides as luxury, and the bible says. What's popular now is the way the miracle of pure style cures or is it curses, crosses our heart, hopes to hide of what it don't get while new angels sing hexes into bottles of northern comfort. Uproar. Jesus, already these myths are obsolete too and fresh the cold details he was bleeding his twisted love into. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (2011), won the Motherwell Prize. Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues , a "dos-a-dos" book featuring poetry, letters and essays, came out in late 2013. Holiday lives in Los Angeles.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

Reviews

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

the thickness of a page / the pixelation of a page / the encounter with the page and its layers layers / how they push out and reveal and are different and are there together. this book is so itself and so much a poetry / so much more a poetry than so much poetry that collects in collections and bland tables of contents that announce the water content of the epiphany or the cucumber. a challenging book a book filled with sharp relentless questions / emotional working throughs. music. legacy. a break from it. a love that doesn't quit / that sings.

[zoë mulraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

there’s so much here. i love books that make me think, question, wonder, and dream. books that remind me that all of my thoughts and feelings have been pre-programmed by a western hegemonic ideal. i love realizing and evaluating how i have been programmed, without judgment or shame. this book encouraged me to question my world and myself AND gave me ideas for how i can deprogram my beliefs and assumptions so that i can be truly happy and truly healthy.

plus, the graphics and poetry of it all is just beautiful.