Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki - Softcover

Barnstone, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1886157715 ISBN 13: 9781886157712

Publisher: BKMK Press, 2009

Synopsis

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."

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Everything about Tongue of War cuts against the current fashions. It is about war--in particular the war in the Pacific, which continues to haunt post-1945 American and Japanese cultures, the war from which many older men and women still have not returned ("There is the man in the war and, later, the war in the man."). It is written in forms, especially the sonnet. The meter, the pulse of human feeling unable to name itself, belies once again the notion that the music of poetry distorts rather than embodies and intensifies the real stuff of human experience. The diction and syntax are often blunt with the exhaustion and terror of human voices--American and Japanese, soldiers and civilians--struggling to articulate the unspeakable, to make visible that to which we have learned to blind ourselves. The voices are as various--guilt-ridden, cynical, stunned, meditative, angry, indifferent, traumatized, proud, regretful--as the nearly infinite shades of the war experience itself. Such is the power of Tongue of War that I cannot help but think that having read it, any American President might be less inclined to send young men and women off to face them.

--B.H. Fairchild

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: BKMK Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1886157715
• ISBN 13: 9781886157712
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 126