Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whither College, and has published his poetry, fiction, essays and translations in dozens of major American journals. His books of poems include Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005) and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998) in addition to the chapbook Naked Magic. He is the recipient of many national poetry prizes and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council The Golem of Los Angeles the 2006 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winner, as judged by Quincy Troupe.

Other poems by Tony Barnstone in Verse Daily:
December 17, 2005:   "Spider Woman" " It's hard to process if you have no drive..."
January 13, 2003:  "On Found Objects" "Do you remember the bull's head I made..."

For Books by Tony Barnstone click here.

Other poems on the web by Tony Barnstone:
"The Cave"
Ten poems
Three poems
Thirteen poems and Six translations
"Aftermath"
Twenty-five poems
"The Video Arcade Buddha"
Seven poems
Three poems

Tony Barnstone's Home Page.

About The Golem of Los Angeles:

"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

"I admire Tony Barnstone's Impure because of the collection's unrelenting believability and lyrical certainty. Plainspoken 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 Kormunyakaa

"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