Tony Barnstone's Books
Oct.11.2009
This book, which won the John Cairdi Prize for Poetry, selected by B. H. Fairchild, is inspired by historical situations and accounts letters, oral histories, news reports, etc., of individuals from both sides of the Pacific theater of World War II, including the home fronts. Barnstone writes that he intends Tongue of War as ''a love letter to the World War II generation.''...
Feb.20.2008
Unmatched in scope and literary quality, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry spans three thousand years, bringing together more than six hundred poems by more than one hundred thirty poets, in translations-many new and exclusive to the book-by an array of distinguished translators.
Here is the grand sweep of Chinese poetry, from the Book of Songs-ancient folk songs said to have been...
Feb.20.2008
The ancient Chinese tradition of erotic poetry has been largely ignored in the west. Now, a vast continent of sensual verse is opened to us with this glorious collection spanning nearly three thousand years and including many poems never before translated into English.
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping have brought together poems about deep love and pure lust, enticement and seduction...
Feb.20.2008
Tony Barnstone is not a polite poet. He is a poet with attitude and passion, and his feet are firmly planted in a this-world Los Angeles of gangbangers, plastic surgery, and teens smoking pot with a wet towel rolled against the door. These are sexy, slangy, funny poems, and strangely enough many of the sexiest and slangiest of them are sonnets or villanelles. In addition to the...
Oct.18.2002
Sad Jazz is a novel-in-sonnets, a sort of updating of the Petrarchan love sonnet sequence that follows a couple through their courtship, marriage, divorce and aftermath. The sonnets in this book are largely metrically true, though a minority of them are experiments -- sonnets that shrink from 14 syllables to two, sonnets that use repetition instead of rhyme, blank verse sonnets,...
Feb.20.1999
A poet of profound amusement and deep and truculent honesty. In Tony Barnstone's first collection of poetry, anxiety and concern with the proliferation of toxic waste, human cruelty, and just plain ugliness are precariously balanced by the power of personal love. He is fascinated by the interconnectedness of everything. "Hair of the Field" shows a young man "mowing...
Feb.20.1996
Amazon.com"Use very straight speech/ without design or calculation." Advice modern day politicos would find impossible to follow, but a good adage for writers needing a reminder to keep things simple and clear. Such tips are scattered throughout The Art of Writing, a collection of ancient Chinese musings on the writer's art, filled with Taoist clarity and sly humor....
About Tony
I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, into a very unusual family. My father, Willis Barnstone, was a young professor at Wesleyan University at that time. When I was two, we left Connecticut to live in Spain on a Guggenheim Fellowship my father had been...