Overview

A Movie, a book-length poem written in sentences, explores the ways movies are woven into the fabric of a life, as cultural products, as objects of intimacy, as social touchstones, as an ideal, as shorthand for certain kinds of experience, while also telling the story of the poet's production of an eighteen-minute vampire movie. Praise for A Movie In A Movie, Courtney Bush presents us with a screen upon which we can view her virtuosic intelligence, pathos and wit, heart and ear in action. The result, A Movie, helps us understand that movies really are actually everything. I mean, really, everything! Movies are the magical invocations to a changed and better life. They're also products of impromptu corporations' intent on capitalizing upon our innermost signatures of feeling. They're projected on the universe's biggest screens and they're on in the background while we're doing something, anything, else. But above all, movies are things that we make, in the basement, in the classroom, in the studio and the streets. Like poetry they are the things we do with our friends. I left the theater of A Movie with wet and salty cheeks-tears of celebration of what this book has taught us and tears of gratitude for giving me the urgent feeling that I must immediately deliver my life kinetically into poetry-the highest compliment I can give. Brandon Brown, poet, translator, author of The Four Seasons You surface from a Courtney Bush book the same way you leave a matinee screening: dazed, altered, shocked back into time. A Movie is a wise and utterly unguarded testament to the reward of making art-what of the world we mark, manipulate, and set apart to make the rest more bearable. ""The bright life,"" Bush reminds us, ""is what Dante called the life outside the Inferno, the life he left behind."" It is the bright life to which she returns us. Jameson Fitzpatrick, author of Pricks In The Tapestry A Movie documents the determined acts of collective fantasy and work that it takes to make a film, to ""make images move."" If I were to adapt this book for the screen, her syntax would be the main character-played by, say, Kate Winslet-honoring the source material by hiding a dark secret behind its beauty and directness: Bush loves, too, the stubborn work that viewers do, with their naps, their interruptions, their plot summaries, their partial views, to make the images stop. Rainer Diana Hamilton, author of God Was Right If poetry was written true without the affectations and writerly tropes, you'd get something crystalline and pure such as Courtney Bush's A Movie. I've never read a book like this really, though I've never met a poet, (or person) like Courtney Bush in general. Part film criticism, part diary-of-an-artist, A Movie chronicles the speaker's idea and then attempts to make a sexy vampire film. But it's also a book about making art, and thinking about making art, and if you do either you'll want to read this too. Ben Fama, author of Deathwish

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9781956921397

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Author Information

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lives and works as a nanny in New York City, where she received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College. Her second full-length collection, I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), is a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. She is also the author of the poetry collection Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), and several chapbooks. Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. More of her work, along with her first feature film, Every Book Is About The Same Thing: The Movie, can be found at courtneybushgreatartist.com. She is also the writer of a strangely beloved newsletter, The Courtney Report.

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