Customer Reviews

Rouge Pulp (Pitt Poetry Series)

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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.

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.

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.

In order to confront the grand spiritual hollowness of American culture (and what it does to women, and to mothers), Dorothy Barresi has armed herself well with archness, wryness, and double-edged self-mockery. A jumpy style allows her to include, in a single poem, Michael Jordan, the illnesses flesh is prone to, sex, and psycholinguistics ("Body Says"), and in another, the Vietnam war, pirates, merciless conglomerates, and philosophy ("Waiting for the Hanged Pirate"). None of these poems has the detached, polished quality of a made voice, but instead clatter (beautifully and harshly, as the emotional moment demands) with the humor and subterranean desperation, overlaid with plentiful blood-bubbles, that mark Barresi's distinctive approach.

Barresi's struggles with motherhood - ranging from her attempts to articulate (but not reconcile; they are too imbricated for much peace, it seems) her complicated feelings for her own mother ("Neither Moth nor Rust"; "Mother, My Porous China, Gone"), to her newly acquired feelings as a mother herself ("For Dante at One"; "At Five Months"), to ruminations on motherhood itself (the line which opens the book, from "Grendel's Mother", is emblematic of the emotional intensity she often achieves: "Every mother is a monster.") - form a sharp focal point around which drift meditations on the anxieties American women suffer for what's sold to them as beauty ("At the Posh Salon Called Ultra"; "Without Panic"), aging ("Possibly I Have Misunderstood"), and family and death ("The Irish in Me"; "Bad Joke").

Each poem is a juggling of knives without handles; it takes a light but absolutely certain touch to dazzle the audience and walk away unscathed. When Barresi pulls this off ("Rouge Pulp"), her mastery of tone is incredible, and even when she doesn't ("Charity Begins"), there are salvageable moments of hilarity (about a vampire receiving roadside first-aid: "In rearview mirrors / we look absurd, like mimes / giving mouth-to-mouth / to the air.").

The tonal and thematic collages Barresi assembles are somewhere in between the confessional and the postmodern, yet this book bears no trace of postmodern pretension. Every page fosters an earnest but sophisticated sympathy behind razoring wit and extra-dry sarcasm.

I never did receive my book. After waiting over a month for it to come I wrote Metalbooks and they told me that a mistake had been made and that they would send it priority mail right away. Well, the book never came and I had to ask for a refund. Try another vendor because in my experience and in others as you can see, Metalbooks doesn't have a good track record.

Far-reaching and eclectic, the poems of Rouge Pulp are sung through gritted teeth. A humor that hurts. Imagine a mother prone to miscarriage sluicing bad whiskey down her throat at the bar and telling dead baby jokes. That kind of ha-ha.

See the poem for the cat-killing coyote, aptly named:"For the Coyote Who Ate Spike: A Revenge in Two Parts" It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but I think you get the idea.

The brutality of the humor seems necessary if its target is a lack of heart, which it often is--Barresi's world is spiritually ill. (I hesitate to say America)

"Bad Joke"

Alright, alright,
what's really bothering me
is my mother.

Since she died,
people tell me, buck up,
she sees you,

as if that were a comfort.
I mean, what are we talking about here?
Omniscient J. Edgar

Mother like the worst
nightmare of childhood?
The one where you have your pinafore

hiked up to Maine
and little Johnny Kingston
with his hands somewhere down in Erie, PA

and it feels good
it feels good
and just then your mother clicks in on

high heels of aghast

But let's not make too big a deal of this spin. Barresi has other talents as well, including a great eye and the courage and talent to engage a cultural moment and indict it with enough clarity and honesty that this reader almost wants to be guilty. Luckily for me, I am. hurray!