The Post-Rapture Diner

Reviews / Votes

[In The Post-Rapture Diner] the brashness and sadness of our polyglot nation is given voice. Dorothy Barresi speaks in tongues-of 'undetonated cherubs,' sitcoms, and agents provocateurs. Her toughminded, eloquent poems articulate family tangles, unintentional cruelties, innocenc and sophistication. . . . With colloquial grace, Barresi sings the American of 'the all-night/pizza delivery boy, the sales clerks, the mobile/dog groomers, the bookies and breadmakers . . . 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 * [This] new book of poetry imagines southern California as a vast, hot, flat desert wasteland that revises T. S. Eliot's epic locale, finding redemption in lyrical strains of ice-cream trucks and sit-com romance. . . . This collection is . . . striking . . . almost always strangely moving, cock-eyed, charming and disarming. Barresi's tone is wise and gullible, her cravings material and mystical, metaphorical and theatrical. . . . What is so graceful about her poems is their but insistent refusal of grace, some transcendental solution or impulse toward a larger, blanker scheme. . . . 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. * <i>Voices in Italian Americana</i> * Barresi. . . .writes poems that have snap, crackle, and pop, with just the right amount of poetic mysterty. . . .Barresi's poetry has wit and pathos. . . .Her metaphors are a delight. * <i>Library Journal</i> * The impossible happens here. [Barresi], with all her dazzling freshmess of language, looks into a wider arrasy of human experience than most poerts have looked at. Her closures, like fireworks, shoot up their light, which continues in silent starbursts to fill the mind's whole sky. Bravo, Dorothy Barresi! * Mona Van Duyn * What a pleasure to find a poet whose sense of risk and honesty drives her to complicate the emotions and attitudes of her poems-so that sorrow might be suddenly hijacked by bravado, or delight by anger and humor-rather than to wrap us up a neat little parcel of agreeable 'sensitivities'. . . .Deeply imagined, full of toughness and great heart, Dorothy Barresi's poems come from the places where we all live now, in America, in the 1990s. I'd pay to read or hear her anytime, I'd stand in line. * <i>Ploughshares</i> *