In The Shadowgraph James Cihlar explores the ways images, performances, and memories shape and inform LGBTQ+ identity. Golden-age Hollywood cinema—in particular the career of fiercely independent actress Barbara Stanwyck—provides the screen on which Cihlar projects characters and stories bravely, even defiantly, performed. Cihlar’s commentary on individual films—as well as on human experience and desire—is intense, smart, and right on target.
Cihlar twines intriguingly into and out of the movies, probing them for pathos and comedy, opposites and doubles.…Pop culture meets pathos in The Shadowgraph, a stirring paean to movie idols who flicker across the screen and sometimes show up in the mirror.
In the tradition of books exploring American life through film, the cruelties of family life, and the experience of being gay in contemporary culture, The Shadowgraph is a glorious collection of poems! Cihlar arrives in full voice that simply stands larger and fresher with each poem. Each one is satisfying, original, and honest.
The Shadowgraph offers graceful and intelligent meditations on the vagaries of memory, film, family history, and emerging gender, sexual, and personal identity. Deftly weaving Hollywood glamour with recollections of his own past, Cihlar explores the ways memory and film work to reconstruct (or recreate) our lived and imagined events. This is a very fine, technically dexterous, moving collection of poems.
Jim Cihlar’s The Shadowgraph presents a love song to the ways a person desperate for kinship can find a surprising lifeline in the filmography of actress Barbara Stanwyck, a star casting a well-defined shadow for LGBTQ Americans even in the era of Hollywood’s ‘lavender marriage.’
James Cihlar is the publisher of Howling Bird Press. He is also the author of Rancho Nostalgia and Undoing.
Marwyck
I. Deep Focus
Saturday Night
Retrospective
The Strand Theater
Breakfast with My Sister
My Mother Believed in Christmas
The Council Bluffs Drive-In Theater
Bequest
Quadrants of the Body
"An Ocean Pouring into an Abyss"
Film Art
An Age at Least to Every Part
The City of the Future
August 29
Coming Home after Teaching a Chaucer Class in Which I Told the Students the Wife of Bath Is a Huge Drag Queen
Bird, Bath, and Beyond
The Past Used to Be Unlived
The Bijou
Another Man’s Poison
Stolen Face
Self-Portrait: A Cento
Manifest Destiny
Lucy Gallant
Hypnotism Is a Religion to Me
The Wreck of Beauty
II. Back Projection
Ladies They Talk About
The Shadowgraph
Banjo on My Knee
Screwball
Night Nurse
Union Pacific
Stella Dallas
No Man of Her Own
There’s Always Tomorrow
To Please a Lady
Melodrama
Witness to Murder
The Night Walker
A Map of the Stars
Walk on the Wild Side
The Furies
Titanic
Sorry, Wrong Number
Double Indemnity
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
