Much contemporary poetry fits into one of the many aesthetic categories that lie between the polar opposites of the radically "experimental" poem and the "traditional," often formal, poem. Dorothy Barresi’s work, however, is singular in its resistance, better yet, rejection, of current poetic camps. Part Sylvia Plath, part John Donne, Barresi handles both surprise and expectation with deftness, displaying uncommon verbal ingenuity and intelligence of investigation. Her third book, Rouge Pulp, spins poems of startling metaphysical image shot through with slang and pop culture. Her narrators are bold, swaggering through the poems as if to say, if we’re all intersections of discourses nowadays, then their job is to speak those multiple voices as articulately as possible.
       The female body and the histories it carries are a central concern in many of these sinuous poems. Unafraid of the audacious statement, Barresi can say without flinching that "Every good mother is terrible." She is speaking, as the title reveals, most immediately about "Grendel’s Mother," but every female reader of the British canon recognizes the seminal role that Beowulf’s heroism plays in the formation of later literary gender roles. Terrible though she may be, Grendel’s mother must die, but even as "[h]er blood melts the prince’s sword:/ that drowned lullaby/ keeps us burning." We turn back to the poem’s beginning statement, "Every mother is a monster," with new understanding, but we also know by the poem’s end that "God loves a good story" and that "A woman must learn this/ at her own risk."
      Barresi leaps from literary history to contemporary America without apology--and without much notice. The horrifying strut of "Body Says"--"I’m the kind of guy who’d steal your stove/ then come back later/ for the smoke" . . . "It’s for the best, Body says./ You be Buddy Holly,/ I’ll be the plane"--lurches into the glamour sales-talk--"Lustre, sister, lustre!" of the next poem, "At the Posh Salon Called Ultra." Her nervy diction recalls Plath and Sexton, and her stanza and line breaks throw image and voice into sometimes shocking relief. "The Irish in Me" twists a title lurking close to the edge of sentimentality into dangerous territory: "Stand back from me/ as if from a window/ cleared by a sniper./ The Irish in me have had every sacrament/ / winched down into them/ like small engines flaming."
      How many poets can be simultaneously funny and terrifying? Not many, but Dorothy Barresi is one of them. Nothing is off-limits; even "Saint Sebastian was thrown into the Roman sewer/ after his martyrdom by arrow,/ / though of course he didn’t care/ by that point (that’s a joke)" ("Poem for the 35th Anniversary of Valium"). She creates a sort of urban gothic, centered on the individual woman who struggles with violence, both historical and personal, and goes shopping for pleasure. She’s sick of the New Critics and their exclusion of the female voice, but she can’t stop fighting the ghost of her own mother. "No woman is beautiful enough," the title poem asserts, and it’s no wonder that "mascara sales are booming." In the face of all we know about sexual politics, she wonders, do so many women still "need reminding that a black eye is not a bouquet"?
      The specter of Christianity, often Catholicism, hangs over many of these poems, grim and unacceptable and weirdly comical. "The Heaven of Otto Plath" is "a big heaven" where "anything can happen," and these poems seem to suggest it, in fact, does. A dead mother is both "spirit now" and "god in the ground" ("To the Place of Unhurried Goodbyes"). Religion is a ghost often exorcised by refusal to speak a received idiom; these poems speak dense metaphor embedded in colloquial self-mockery. "One way to learn about faith," she says with seeming sincerity, "is to lose it completely." But this is a "student of divinity/ with a head cold," who finally tells off the "damn dead": "You crumb, you magic pain in the neck!/ It should be illegal/ / to die so completely" ("Rough Simple") Trained to be good, "Too long my Catholic schoolgirl kisses/ waited in line,/ not talking to their neighbors/ to the right or left" ("Unkissing"), she’s had enough, as one wonderful epigraph, quoting a Catholic priest suggests: "You aren’t practicing Catholicism; you’re practicing Dorothyism."
      And thank God that she is. Balancing erudition and fashionable beauty with perfect ease, Barresi’s narrators are equally at home "unquot[ing] Sylvia Plath to describe Bobby Kennedy’s death--"not like death’s sticky pearls / . . . but more precisely / / like hemoglobin and plasma, and all the parts of his blood" and writing a "Poem to Some of My Recent Purchases." Shopping, after all, one poem asserts, is a way of forgetting--"if I never buy anything/ how will I distract myself?," even as its lists undo that statement. Even "Lipstick, pantyhose (Donna Karan), [and an] A-line cashmere skirt" cannot unsay the things she avoids: "big wars," "small ones" "babies . . . not always/ kissed or fed," "boys [who] murder boys," "politicians [who] dance with underage girls." She knows her "sarcasm will not help," but this is the "ascendant American paradigm." What does it conceal? Plenty. "Take me home," she says to her "bracelet, perfume, lampshade, purse" in a sudden, serious turn, "where I might hold you in my lap awhile,/ now that I am often afraid."
      Is this a sock-hop, a strip-tease, or a dance of death? The poems of Rouge Pulp are, astonishingly, all of these. Formalists will likely find the book unpolished and experimentalists may find the poems too grounded in the formal considerations of line and stanza as units of meaning. Those who are impatient with list poems will complain about her penchant for catalogs of various kinds and those who dislike pop culture will protest that the poems’ references are transient. But Dorothy 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.