Rouge Pulp (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Dorothy Barresi (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry Series | Publication Date: October 6, 2002

Dorothy Barresi’s poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“ . . . Barresi’s real strength is her humor, and she shows it off in hilarious riffs on the circus of beautification . . . And when she has a subject that hits right on her central obsession,  Barresi’s wit can shine brightly, as in her elegy to a burlesque star . . . a real atom smasher.”
--New York Times Book Review

“‘Rouge Pulp’ is one of the most memorable, original books of poetry to appear in a long time.”
”Part Sylvia Plath, part John Donne, Barresi handles both surprise and expectation with deftness, displaying uncommon verbal ingenuity and inteligence of investigation.  . . . ‘Rouge Pulp’ spins poems of startling megaphysical imagae shot through with slang and pop culture.  . . . How many poets can be simultaneously funny and terrifying? Not many, but Dorothy Barresi is one of them.”
“Is this a sock-hop, a strip-tease, or a dance of death? The poems of Rouge Pulp are, astonishingly, all of these. . . . Barresi’s work transcends category or camp, and Rouge Pulp is one of the most memorable, original books of poetry to appear in a long time.”
--Pleiades

From the Inside Flap

"Always sassy and reckless, always poignant and heart-wrenching, Dorothy Barresi’s astonishing poems constantly fill us with a rare, bare-knuckled exuberance about the world. Stylistically inventive and dancing with her trademark verbal jazz, these new poems distinguish Rouge Pulp as one of the finest collections of recent years."—David St. John

"There’s so much grief and anger, awe and laughter and love in these poems—so much of the whole human dynamic—that they could power a small city in the Midwest, with enough juice left over to shock the terminally earnest back to life."—Elton Glaser

"Poems of the body. Of the immigrant. Of grief. Of motherhood. Of and about beauty. Hart Crane. Otto Plath. Even the last Kennedy. And all of them deeply American. And all of them written with the clear eye and honest speech we have come to expect of Dorothy Barresi."—Gillian Conoley

"It’s all here—bright wit, passion, the innuendoes of history, the music of urban California, prodigious light—all of it made from the essential encounter with birth and death. Rouge Pulp is Dorothy Barresi’s best book yet."—David Rivard

Rouge Pulp explores a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (October 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822957892
• ISBN-13: 978-0822957898
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,946,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lipstick and Lament, May 2, 2005

By 

Pelin Ariner "Pelin Ariner" (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rouge Pulp (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Dorothy Barresi is something of an everywoman's poet- erudite yet down to earth, witty, funny and soulful all at once. The poems in Rouge Pulp range in topic from motherhood to the Kennedys, from cockfights to female beauty standards, and while they do not trade in complexity for accessibility, they also never leave the reader feeling stranded, lost or bored.

The collection is framed by a fateful symmetry stemming from events in the author's own life: the death of her mother and the birth of her son (a poem called Grendel's Mother begins the book and one called At Five Months ends it). Barresi mourns her mother's death in myriad ways, sometimes in the voice of plain sorrow as in Poem for the 35th Anniversary of Valium which concludes "When I miss her I know/I will never get enough to eat." Other times she is darkly comedic, as when, tired of well-meaning people telling her "she sees you", she imagines a "heaven full of mothers/at floaty, star-case cubicles/with earphones/and high-powered telescopes/pointed down, and wicked grins."

Barresi's quick, inventive ear keeps her poetry engaging throughout, (Lustre, sister, lustre! begins the poem At the Posh Salon called Ultra) and coupled with her imagination produces some wonderfully unexpected results (mishearing "van fire" as "vampire" on the car radio, the author sets off musing about the undead on a southbound freeway). There are also darker poems in the book, most notably The Rat Man, which begins with "if you hear meat forks/walking in the walls,/call me" and proceeds to create an otherworldly character with an eeriness reminiscent of Charles Simic's earlier poems. Barresi takes a non-delusional view of self and America, of the constructed, consumer American self, (the Poem to Some of My Recent Purchases is unashamed to admit taking pleasure in said purchases) but is also firmly self-critical, in a poem such as Without Panic, where she writes "Lately, the local wisdom has it/we're not selfish,/just honoring our worthiness/to receive." Rouge Pulp is the product of an authoritative voice that is also deeply ironic and playful, and as such, is a great pleasure to hear.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the petite sequins, the fine bones, May 1, 2005

By 

[d]awn lonsinger - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rouge Pulp (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

On the textured, mutineer tongue of these poems, popular culture and personal culture inhabit the same supermarket, dreams, and phylum, where "stars like fine bone buttons" cabinet and amass our vision, where we tend vampires because "We, too, / are not yet fully dead." In Rouge Pulp, Barresi dares to stare into our contemporary coulee, to not look away when "they crochet lace with meat hooks," to seriously consider our materialist obsessions ("I tear open your clear wrappings with my teeth / in the front seat of my car. / I love you."), our inevitable disappearance--both the body & its body of events foreshadowing, our elaborate ruses, evasions...to map our history one celebrity plane crash after another--" It's for the best, Body says. / You be Buddy Holly, / I'll be the plane." This book crackles like oil, moves like the body in its own bag, and will eat the arrangement of blue icing flowers creeping over your cake.

The language in this book is literally boiling. I can't remember the last time I read a book of poems with such fizz, a currency I could easily confuse with the blood in my body. These poems somehow maintain an imperative center while attending to the caprice of events. The unexpected is paramount here, Barresi's brilliance partly the petite sequins of her images blinking like a strip club sign--a "broken strand of actresses / in kitten heel pumps / walking backwards underground." But in the strip club, the flash is folded over the horror of war, of its couched power play, soldiers at the edge of their own bodies, damned by "a terrible clarity."

This poetry is perforated along the body, which is, at every turn, circumscribed, ventriloquized, loaded--"Body says, meet the animal / who made you." The body is a receptacle for being and being unraveled--"Death takes a lifetime to get here." The book starts, "Every mother is a monster," at the juncture between two bodies, pregnancy, where our nature & our culture collide in birth, where "the water is already torn." Powerfully personal moments of motherhood are seamlessly connected to the outer space where we are "shading our public eyes against the private sunlight leaking / jet fuel and crushed diamonds / over everything." This book has buttered bones, emits carpet shocks. "I would not drown for thinking," Barresi writes. I would not light up if not for listening:

Unto the bowling alley of family love,
which is none-of-your-goddamned-business.
Unto red meat and milk.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "a foaming meadow of/ strewn flowers... a crime scene", April 29, 2005

By 

Ivy Kleinbart (Geneva, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rouge Pulp (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Dorothy Barresi's wild wit infuses her book's central and ancient themes of motherhood and identity, which she explores in all their contemporary multiplicity (and occasional duplicity!), at times layered with the sheen of glamour and at times, as when pleading with the dead, painfully stripped of it. Motherhood, in these poems, includes not only the speaker's indefatigable love for her son "stand[ing] at the wooden baby gate... a raisin clamped in one wet fist... beating time in the other," but also the savage protective instinct we see in "Grendel's Mother" (the book's first poem), in which a mother (as monster) is driven to kill whatever would harm her child. Barresi writes from the perspective of both mother and daughter, considering both ends of the mirroring wish to be "good enough, good enough, good enough," though we are left finally (and necessarily) with the pathos of human failure and alienation, as in "Chronic," "Cuttings" (about the self-mutilating act of cutting), and "Poem for the 35th Anniversary of Valium" (written in memory of the poet's mother, and perhaps a few other deceased kindred spirits).

Just as the members of the band in "Glass Dress" are said to know the difference "between naked and undressed," Barresi's poetry recognizes the human need for both spiritual and material protective layers, whether in the form of clothing, entertainment, or the raw attitude of the "illimitable body." And this is precisely where glamour and materialism meet "to draw [the world] nearer" to console the interminable, mourning daughter. Tonally reminiscent of Frank O'Hara in its brash and unabashed celebration of glitz as glamour, "Poem to Some of My Recent Purchases" casts a devastating spotlight on a postmodern culture of euphoric materialism (admirably, without pretending to stand outside of it): "Bracelet, earrings, tanzanite toe ring/ (I liked peridot better/ but they didn't have my size),// if I never buy anything,/ how will I distract myself?" There's a fine line between a sequin dress and a disguise, between L'Oreal's "Goddess, with its hint of burnt toast and lilac" and a mask. Rouge Pulp reveals something about the power of glamour--its social and ritualistic importance extending even into the funereal realm ("Neither Moth nor Rust")--while at the same time poking fun of the exclusive money-making glamour industry ("At the Posh Salon Called Ultra").

With crystalline self-assurance (and a fine gloss of "lipstick/ just right"), Rouge Pulp speaks at the intersection of stately sophistication and the giddy adventurousness of the sexiest girl you know telling you secrets in the back seat of an old Chevy. Taking a hint from the book's title--if there's any blood shed here, it'll be both hers and yours. But don't worry, a little make-up will take care of that.