Welcome to Kathryn Gray's 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': 'you're / 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: 'It's "relatable". / It's 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 Sirk's 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 can't 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 writer's 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 Hollywood's brutal disdain for failure, Gray manages to find spectacle - and survival.

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crevecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crevecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

Voices and Visions: Interviews with the Contemporary English-Language Poets of Wales captures the perspectives of key Anglophone Welsh and Wales-associated poets who have emerged in the wake of devolution and Wales's 1997 "yes" vote - or whose career profiles and development were consolidated in its wake. The post-1997 era has been a dynamic one - notably characterised by a striking gender shift, in which women are now at the very centre of Anglophone Welsh poetics. It has also been a period in which a number of idiosyncratic younger voices have emerged and established themselves both within Wales and further afield. Compelling and candid, these interviews examine poets' practice and preoccupations, their native and elective poetic identities, their personal insights into a changing Wales, the prevailing conditions which may have enabled them, and their place within the wider firmament of British poetics. Voices and Visions: Interviews with the Contemporary English-Language Poets of Wales is a fascinating record of play, seriousness, ambition, and local and international interests from the point of view of some of Wales's most significant contemporary poets. Poets included: Zoe Brigley, Sarah Corbett, Jasmine Donahaye, Jonathan Edwards, Dai George, Ian Gregson, Philip Gross, Meirion Jordan, Patrick McGuinness, Pascale Petit, Deryn Rees-Jones, Gwyneth Lewis, Rhian Edwards, Zoe Skoulding, and Tiffany Atkinson.