Apocryphal Poems

by Tony Barnstone, Alexandra Eldridge (Illustrator)

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.

142 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Tony Barnstone is the Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. His books of poems include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BKMK Press, 2009, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry), The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008, winner, Benjamin Saltman Award); 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 (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 (UP 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 Publishers). Among his awards are a fellowship from the NEA, a fellowship from the California Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and 1st place in in the 2008 Strokestown International Poetry Prize.

He is the recipient of many national poetry prizes and of 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. His website is:
http://www.barnstone.com