Pulp Sonnets

by Tony Barnstone, Amin Mansouri (Illustrations)

Improvising on the tropes of classic pulp fiction, including genres like crime noir , horror, sci-fi, superhero, espionage, and vigilante, Tony Barnstone's audacious new poems are counterpointed by the mischievous (and blood-splattered) ink drawings of Iranian artist Amin Mansouri. At times reinventing the sonnet tradition, Barnstone's linked sequences evoke serial-format comics and cinema, as each series breaks into discrete frames propelled by action. The ancient gods and epics have been high-jacked by animations and video games, but pulp remains unconquerable -- ghastly, shameless, outrageous -- and fun!

148 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2015

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

Reviews

[Susan McLean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sonnet noir--it's a thing

Okay, full disclosure: I am not the ideal audience for this collection of sonnets. I love sonnets and sonnet sequences; I enjoy the puns and the wit of all the allusions (in unexpected contexts) to famous poems; and I find the illustrations both stylish and intriguing, with visual wit galore. But you couldn’t pay me to watch a horror film; I am bored by vampires, zombies, werewolves, haunted houses, superheroes, etc.; and I find the violence and sexism of hard-boiled detective fiction, Mafia tales, and other macho genres deeply dispiriting. The only genres that Barnstone covers that I enjoy are myth, fantasy, and science fiction (but not the space operas that he parodies in the book).

Despite these significant obstacles, I did find much to enjoy in the book. I knew enough of the expectations of the genres to tell when they were being subverted, and many of the stories work at more than one level, alluding to things outside the genre. The meter of the sonnets is often rocky, more conversational than metrical at times, but that is more typical than not among contemporary sonnets. Some of the humor worked for me, some didn’t—yet that is true for most humor. The collection has the same problem that I find in most “project” poetry books, that not every poem in the sequence works equally well, but once you set out to tell a story, you need to include all parts of it. Some of the punch lines and turns were startling or funny; some were just there to move the story along.

I think the ideal reader for this collection would be someone who does love the genres depicted, who is more conversant with comic books and movies in the genres than I am, and who also loves sonnets and the full range of poetry in English (with some French and Spanish thrown in for good measure). But even readers who, like me, only have some of those qualifications will still find things to like in it.

[Randy Cauthen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is great stuff. Ranges from noir detective to vampires to space opera and back again. Fun, imaginitive, and messing with the underlying cultural assumptions (mostly about what babes are for) of all these genres.