GOLEM OF LOS ANGELES

Description

The Golem of Los Angeles is the 2006 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winning poetry collection by Tony Barnstone. "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

Tony Barnstone is professor of English at Whittier 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. His other books include The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry; Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry; Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei; The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters; and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America; Literatures of Asia; and Literatures of the Middle East. He has also published Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman 2008) and The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, winner Benjamin Saltman Award). 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 lived for years in Greece, Spain, Kenya, and China before taking his Masters in English and creative writing and PhD in English literature at UC Berkeley.