Tony Barnstone is Assistant Professor of Creative
Writing and English at Whittier College, and has published his poetry,
fiction, essays and translations in dozens of major American journals.
His books include Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone; Out of the
Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry; Laughing Lost in the
Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei; The Art of Writing: Teachings of the
Chinese Masters; and Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin
America. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington,
Indiana, Barnstone lived for years in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China
before taking his Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in
English Literature at UC Berkeley.
Read "Commandments," from Impure, Tony Barnstone's new book of poetry. Find out what he has to say about his work in an interview with him from amazon.com. Also check out Tony's poem, "The Video Arcade Buddha" and his review of Arthur Sze's The Redshifting Web.
"I admire Tony Barnstone's Impure because of the collection's
unrelenting believability and lyrical certainty. Plain-spoken and magical,
this poet knows how to make imagination and the real world collide softly.
There is a clarity in Impure that reaches beyond the formlessness
of modern life. Borders are crossed in the psyche and the flesh, and this
collection seems like an elongated song that embraces the most elusive
moments buried in language and nuance through the pure naming of things -
a mantra of what is and what is dreamt - that takes into the sacred
territory what no ordinary compass can plot or unplot."
--- Yusef Komunyakaa
"Tony Barnstone has no walls. He is alive moment to moment at the naked
center. In his shrewd double vision, the animal self and the outside self
mingle in ecstasy and grief of flesh. He is so surprising and fearless
and cuts right to it, and yet so delicate and lyrical. The pure Impure!
Bravo!"
---Ruth Stone
"Tony Barnstone unabashedly celebrates bodily joy and pokes the
backside of everything prudish and puritanical. He is a poet of profound
amusement, a spirit accountant, an heir to Whitman, Basho and Neruda. He
works in many styles, but his hallmark is a deep and truculent honesty, a
desire to bring secrets into the open. "Impure" is a first book to
revere."
---Rodney Jones
Publications
Impure. Published by University Press of Florida in 1999. amazon.com
Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Published by Prentice Hall in 1999. amazon.com
The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters. Published by Shambhala in 1996. amazon.com
Out of the Howling Storm. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993. amazon.com
Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei. Published by University Press of New England in 1991. amazon.com
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