Amazon.com Review
Dorothy Barresi's The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of the 1997 American Book Award, presents readers with a series of long narrative poems connected by the myriad pains and contradictions of everyday life. The book repeatedly confronts the tarnished reality of the lower and middle classes where "The story the body lives in is crazy. / It begins and ends and there is / no end to it but change." Imitating the "singed, unseemly world" with unanticipated line breaks and rhythmic jumps, Barresi forces a reader to the question: "Leave or howl, diminish--on all fours at the concrete river-- / where would we go next? / How far away from home is safe? / Face on the river, / who will tell us to stop when we finally arrive?"
With a host of quotidian details ranging from public-access TV to Swiss Army knives, these narratives recall the poems in Campbell McGrath's American Noise. Yet Barresi refuses any postmodern intellectual distance, instead focusing on the confused people stuck in the middle of each meticulously detailed material scene. Barresi finds beauty in the most mundane individuals--as in the final lines of the book's last poem, "The Jaws of Life," when the narrator gives money to "a panhandler working the parking lot, / wearing a black trash bag for a blouse":
...She wouldn't look at me,It is moments like this that brand Barresi as one of the most important of the postmodern narrative poets. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
but with an odd bobble and fierce craning of her neck,
she compassed the spot where her feet
met burning asphalt, as though to say,
this life and no other!
Neither did she say thank you.
And her toenails were painted bright red.
Review
. . . The Post-Rapture Diner creates a language commensurate to the ethical complexities of this particular American moment and to the ongoing human dilemma. -- Alice Fulton
I found myself entranced by Barresi's magical specter of the real, the full-bodied images provided by Nureyev or Ralph Kramden-who, after all, has his own ideas about the moon. -- Elizabeth Mazzola, Voices in Italian Americana
I found myself entranced by Barresi's magical specter of the real, the full-bodied images provided by Nureyev or Ralph Kramden-who, after all, has his own ideas about the moon. -- Elizabeth Mazzola, Voices in Italian Americana
