No breakout leads—a prisoner of rerunson local stations high up on the dial:a stray recurring role, a guest appearanceon Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files.Her second act? Pure dullsville in Van Nuys.Chablis with ice. A Chevy dealershipgone belly up. Her paunchy husband’s lies:a broken marriage. Then a broken hip.None of that matters, if you ever catch hersinging “How High the Moon”—silvery, misty—on that one show . . . She isn’t any match forthe stainless Julie London or June Christy,but through her gauzy voice, as through a sieve,spare notes of heaven reach you from afar.For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe:Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.
Uncredited
Boris Dralyuk
Feature Date
- June 30, 2022
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“Uncredited” from MY HOLLYWOOD by Boris Dralyuk.
Published by Paul Dry Books on April 5, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Boris Dralyuk.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Boris Dralyuk is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, First Things, Subtropics, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He lives in Los Angeles. My Hollywood is his debut poetry collection.
"These [poems] are the souvenirs of an almost-vanished glamour, an ethnic, gritty, free-wheeling city, little fantasias encased in rhyme and meter."
—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's
"The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the 21st century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art. Pay attention, readers: a new maestro is in our midst."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
"Dralyuk is a master of poetic craft whose use of meter and rhyme give his original work a classic flavor, and allow him to translate Russian poetry with skill, flare, and authenticity that is rare. My Hollywood is a book to savor."
—A. M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
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