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THE GOLEM
OF LOS ANGELES |
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Buy at Amazon.com:
click here |
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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 personal poems, the many narrative
poems here bring to life the dead of the
Holocaust, the heroin addict who gets a
job in Beijing so he can't get the drug,
the Arab dhow captain off the coast of
Kenya, and the physicist studying
neutrinos at the South Pole.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the
book is the pervasive sense of humor (as
the woman in one poem says, I think I
could / be anorexic. I just don't have /
the discipline!" Rodney Jones writes of
Barnstone's first book, Impure,
"Tony Barnstone unabashedly celebrates
bodily joy and pokes the backside of
everything prudish and puritanical. He
is a poet of profound amusement..."; In
this wide-ranging, prize-winning book,
Barnstone continues to entertain,
standing naked like the nude model of
one the book's poems, and "turning into
art."
Before it won the 2006 Benjamin Saltman
Award in Poetry, The Golem of Los
Angeles was a finalist for the
Dorsett Prize, 2005, the Philip Levine
Prize in Poetry, 2005, the May Swenson
Poetry Prize, 2005 and 2006, the 2nd
Annual Robert E. Lee & Ruth I. Wilson
Poetry Book Award, 2005, the Ashland
Poetry Prize, 2005, and the Prairie
Schooner Prize Book in Poetry, 2004; it
was a runner-up for the Cleveland State
University Poetry Center Open
Competition, 2005 and the Main Street
Rag Chapbook Contest, 2002; and it was a
semi-finalist for the Ohio State
University Press/The Journal Award in
Poetry, 2006, the Kathryn A. Morton
Prize in Poetry, 2005 and the
Brittingham Prize, 2004 and 2006. Poems
from the book have been nominated for
the Pushcart Prize seven times, and "The
167th Psalm of Elvis" won a Pushcart
Prize in 2006.
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Praise for The Golem of Los Angeles: |
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Tony Barnstone's poems are besotted
with the world--slot machines in
Vegas, ants and centipedes and
rivers, fires and beaches and
filtered forest light, love in its
carnal splendor, and the charnel
squalor when love dies. Yet the
Contents page in The Golem of Los
Angeles--full of Psalms, Parables,
Testaments, Sermons, Sutras, even
the occasional Spell--makes clear
that Barnstone's deepest impulse is
religious: to praise and to pray. I
praise this book. May it fly,
reader, into your hand.
Charles Harper Webb
The Golem of Los Angeles
gives us poetry full of pain,
horror, despair--and beauty. Tony
Barnstone gives new form and meaning
to the parable, the sermon, the
psalm, the sutra. The reader cries,
yet laughs in delight.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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