Véronique Pittolo’s Hero is a book-length hybrid poem exploring masculinity and femininity within the structuring conventions of film noir. In this text, at once harsh and delicate, abrupt and poignantly resonant, Pittolo opens our understandings of the tropes that inform our ideas about and enactments of love, gender, and the contemporary version of the heroic. A ground-breaking work on its publication in France in 1998 (Editions Al Dante / Niok): Hero is both a deliciously engrossing lyric sequence and an unsettling work of cultural critique. Wise about the ways in which heroes are produced by their audience, Pittolo’s book is part of a body of work responsive to literary traditions, film criticism, and popular culture.