Dorothy Barresi


Dorothy Barresi is an American poet.

Life

She was raised in Akron, Ohio. She teaches in the English Department at California State University at Northridge
Her work has appeared in Antioch Review, AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Parnassus, POETRY, Pool, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly and Southern Review.
She has served often as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.
She is married to Phil Matero, and they have sons Andrew and Dante. They live in the San Fernando Valley.

Education

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.