Box Office Gospel by Marissa Glover
Reviewed by Elizabeth Sylvia
Mercer University Press, 2023
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When I was little, I loved the story of Dinah in my hand-me-down book of Bible tales. Dinah did all the things I never felt brave enough do: defied her father, dressed in fancy clothes, and ran off to see the city lights. Despite the consequences of Dinah’s transgressions, her thrill-seeking still charms me. She wanted to live! The poems in Marissa Glover’s Box Office Gospel draw from such Bible tales and from stories of pop culture heroes to consider how narratives shape our understanding of the past and future, especially when it comes to gender roles and personal relationships.
Box Office Gospel begins with an invitational paradox, a surprising mixture of Old Testament moralizers and television heartthrobs. Glover mines each for a wisdom that often delivers the opposite of what it seems designed to provide. Jon Snow and King David both figure as disappointing husbands, highlighting one of the book’s major preoccupations, that “No one knows / / how things begin or end.” Glover considers the betrayal of Daenerys’ death at Jon Snow’s hand alongside the embarrassment Michal felt from David’s drunken dancing, but her attention to the future’s unpredictability extends beyond legend to consider “The bullet…not meant for the boy.” If either the Bible or the boob tube have something to teach us, it’s that we can’t anticipate the outcome, no matter how much we want to. Even the Bible can’t offer certainty, because “It’s all too much for God to say.”
Except of course, for when we can. In a collection consistently attuned to paradox, Glover reminds us that we do often have the necessary evidence for judgment, especially when considering dangerous, reckless men, like when
we draft the cornerback who runs
real fast because we have a hole
in our defense—never mind that he lost
his scholarship for doing drugs
or beating women.
In “Complicit,” that cornerback keeps company with Donald Trump and the guy who sends “unsolicited dick picks,” bad news bros we might pretend we didn’t know about, except the evidence is clear: “[W]e saw it coming. / We knew.” Those badly behaved men we fail to learn from aren’t confined to a single poem. In “MeToo,” the speaker asks
What about David, the Israelite
King, who commanded Tamar
cook food for her brother
and feed him when he was sick
with lust, and then did nothing
for his daughter after Amnon
raped her? Looking the other way
is as old as sin. Just ask Jacob
what he did to defend Dinah.
My book of Bible stories never mentioned that Dinah’s punishment was to be raped. Looking the other way is “as old as sin,” and Glover’s poems remind us that averting our eyes is a sin of its own, one we practice as often now as in ancient times, though the Bible also offers better models, the “brother[s] who will not forget [their] sisters,” who will “run Ammon through with a sword.”
Glover’s attention to complications and complicity threads through the book, so that it’s never an angry jeremiad against male power, but always sensitive to the back-and-forth of willful ignorance, as when she considers the allure of Jonathan Rhys-Myers playing Henry VIII, an actor so much more beautiful than the historical king that “now we women find ourselves / aching for a man who was covered in pus- / filled boils.” Throughout the free verse collection, Glover carries her poems with that intimate, confiding voice, the voice of a friend revealing, with both humor and heartbreak, her own regrettable choices and hopeful perseverance in love and parenthood.
As the collection deepens, the speaker both affirms and questions the hopefulness born of being “raised on Disney movies,” which may make her difficult to love yet keeps her optimistic that love will endure even in Tennessee or “Florida, lightning capital / of the country.” Still, worries intrude around the edges, reminders of fathers and other men who have broken their promises, and the fear that despite what she has learned from her “childhood heroes…. None of the old wisdom works” when she confronts her own teenager’s frustrations and anxieties. While memory, faith and our modern mythologies often sustain us, we are all improvising and “Any mom would do so / many things differently / given the chance.” Throughout this section of the collection Mary recurs as a balm and companion, a model of motherly love and patience, a shared heart of worry.
Let me assure readers unfamiliar with the Bible stories Glover cites that they won’t be left behind: her speakers relish retelling the stories explored in her poems, with a conspiratorial tone that renders Biblical Jacob as accessible as Game of Thrones. At points, Glover even joins the performance, interposing QR codes that link to readings of poems throughout the text, a conceit I’ve never seen before, but enjoyed thoroughly. The collection’s friendly, intimate voice becomes literally live on the page screen, and Glover becomes part of the box office gospel.
Storytelling both epic and personal anchors this narrative. The poems move beyond considering public bad actors to tell private stories of romantic failure, as when the speaker of one poem breaks her arm spying on her first, maybe cheating, love. Again and again, the speaker seeks enlightenment from her experiences, and is repeatedly confronted by the future’s refusal to abide by human expectation. And yet, the book ends hopefully, with the understanding that while the speaker is only human, and will never be Wonder Woman or move mountains, she endures. Those mountains she “cannot move”? She climbs them, and the reader climbs too.
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Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and teacher from Massachusetts whose first book, None But Witches (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by C&R Press, DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day.
ID: Cover of Box Office Gospel by Marissa Glover. An ornate stage before a purple-black sky.
Psaltery & Lyre 