The Post-Rapture Diner

"[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. . . . 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. . . . Barresi's tone is wise and gullible, her cravings material and mystical, metaphorical and theatrical. . . . . 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." --Voices in Italian Americana "Barresi's poetry has wit and pathos. . . . Her metaphors are a delight." --Library Journal "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." --Ploughshares Dorothy Barresi's poems have been published widely in literary journals, including Poetry, Parnassus, the Harvard Review, the Antioch Review and the Kenyon Review, and her essay-reviews appear semi-regularly in the Gettysburg Review. She has been the recipient of Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her poetry has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where she is Chair of the Creative Writing program. She lives in Los Angeles, California.