Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki

by Tony Barnstone

Overview

Poetry. This book won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by B. H. Fairchild, who writes in his foreword, "TONGUE OF WAR is one of the most distinctive manuscripts I have ever judged for a book prize (And it is a book rather than simply a collection)." Barnstone writes that he intends TONGUE OF WAR as "a love letter to the World War II generation." But he explains, "I see the sequence as a history in verse in which I allow the readers to inhabit multiple and warring perspectives on the War in the Pacific, including the Pearl Harbor attack, Hiroshima, and the conflict in between." Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler writes that "Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781886157712
Publisher:	BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Publication date:	11/30/2009
Pages:	125
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College and has a master's in English and creative writing and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley. His books of poetry include TONGUE OF WAR: FROM PEARL HARBOR TO NAGASAKI (BkMk Press, Univ of Missouri-Kansas City, 2009), The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry, Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005) and Impure: Poems (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to a chapbook of poems, Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (University Press of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall). Among his awards are the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and a Pushcart Prize in poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone has lived in Greece, Spain, Kenya, and China.