In Apocryphal Poems, Tony Barnstone tells all the truth, but tells it slant, creating a world like ours but seen refracted in a slightly skewed mirror. Here are imaginary sciences, apocryphal religions, our mortality sprouting into new life, strange philosophies. Here is the Buddha as a flight of neutrinos, beach partiers in Florida as stars being swallowed by a black hole, the beast of the Apocalypse emerging from the labyrinth in the guise of AI, love manifesting as oxytocin and vasopressin, those groovy hormones. "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth" writes William Blake, and in the refracting mirror of these poems our world shatters to reflect our strangeness, multiplicity and changing masks of life in the 21st century.
Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 23 books and a music CD. His books of poetry include Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (bilingual, translated by Mariano Zaro); Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a translator or co-translator of world literature, primarily Chinese but also Spanish and Urdu. Among his awards are: The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, The John Ciardi Prize, The Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. He co-edited the anthologies Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States; Dead and Undead Poems; and Monster Verse. His new publications are a co-translation from the Urdu, Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib and a creativity tool, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity. He is currently co-writing the libretto for an opera with composer Teresa LeVelle.
"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—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, Poet, Professor, psychotherapist
"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, Poet Laureate of Vermont, 2007
"Plain-spoken and magical, this poet knows how to make imagination and the real world collide softly. 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, Poet, Winner of 1994 Pulitzer Prize
