Courtney Bush’s, 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. Bush’s paratactic arrangement of very normal sounding sentences reads like a flickering animation.

Check out these opening credits:

As I waited in the dark theater for the Secret Life of Pets 2 to begin, my arm brushed against the soft forearm of the woman beside me.

The 7th floor theater at Regal Court Street was packed on the hottest day of Brooklyn summer.

My edible kicked in during the first trailer.

I traced a heart in the sweat on my large Diet Coke.

I watched a famous actor stutter onscreen in 19th century New York, trying to make his way in the New World, which would be hard enough without the speech impediment.

I watched a supercut of the man as he gained confidence in public speaking at the hand of a mentor.

This was a popular subgenre of movie at the time.

A man in the past tries to lose his stutter.

It was simply Edward Norton’s turn.

Old fashioned gas lamps, Coney Island in CGI.

The score built in meaning, more gold blended into the color grade with each passing frame. 

Can you believe it used to look like this? it seemed to ask.

No, because it didn’t.

A woman with a tiny waist and billowing skirt, like the skirts through a window in a Frank O’Hara poem, waited for Edward Norton on the Brooklyn Bridge.

We are told the movie will be out in time for Thanksgiving.

The woman beside me, swallowed for a moment in the darkness between trailers, said with calm disgust:

They just wanted to make a movie.