ReviewsS04

Iron Horse Literary Review

Spring 2004 Book Reviews

Rouge Pulp
Dorothy Barresi. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. $12.95 (paper)

Rouge Pulp begins with Barresi's ambitious nod to the joyous pain of motherhood, through a re-telling of the Beowolf myth, which strikes this reader as tender and gutsy, all in one (s)word swipe: "Every mother is a monster / If you don't know that / you don't know anything about love."

Dorothy Barresi writes the kind of poetry that intrigues a reader. Her tone is all schoolgirl charm and mysterious promise; her vocabulary is playful and erudite. . .

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets

Ray Gonzalez, ed.. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2003. $22.95 (paper)

No Boundaries makes me want to write poetry--a testament to its twenty-four authors' abilities to inspire, dazzle, infuriate, and defy. In the introduction, Ray Gonzalez defines what makes a prose poem and describes how the prose poem has grown in popularity in the United States over the last hundred years, and his remarks about the delight of writing poetry in prose form are dead on. Gonzalez goes awry when he talks about poets being eventually "cured" of their need for lines: prose poetry isn't a replacement. . .

Facts of Life

Carol Coffee Reposa. Dallas, TX: Browder Springs Press, 2002. $12.00 (paper)

In Facts of Life, Carol Coffee Reposa's third book, her poems find their strength not in the actual (she writes about grading papers, teaching Shakespeare, and San Angelo, Texas) but rather in how Reposa represents the actual. A fact is defined as "something that has actual existence," and after reading the book, I continued to focus on the bold Facts sitting above the old shed with the blue door and shutters on the cover.

In this collection, Reposa transforms mundane facts. . .

Two of these books are available at Amazon.com

Click the image below of the book you want

and you will be redirected to it's location.

Rough Pulp

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets

cover

Facts of Life: Currently unavailable at Amazon.com

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