This extraordinary anthology gathers together a broad selection of representative, authoritative writings—spanning antiquity to the present—from the non-Western civilizations of the Middle East. It combines extensive introductions, headnotes, and bibliographies with excellent literary translations of the best contemporary and classical writers. The selections reflect literary, religious, and philosophical traditions and reveal—despite cultural differences—the universality of life experiences. Primary literary genres (poetry, fiction, and drama) as well as key religions, philosophical, historic, aesthetic, biographical and political texts are covered. For readers of Middle Eastern, World, and Non-Western Literature.

Literatures of the Middle East

Literature & Fiction

Barnstone, Willis

Barnstone, Tony

History & Criticism

Pearson

Impure (Contemporary Poetry Series)

"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 JonesIn Tony Barnstone’s first collection of poetry, anxiety and concern with the proliferation of toxic waste, human cruelty, and just plain ugliness are precariously balanced by the power of personal love. He is fascinated by the interconnectedness of everything. "Hair of the Field" shows a young man "mowing" his lawn with a pair of garden shears, thinking of Walt Whitman’s words on grass, of Whitman as grass, then of following the roots of grass—and words—back through the centuries and continents and somehow emerging from this etymological adventure back in his own yard "with [his] hands stained green."No matter where Barnstone finds himself (a video arcade, a mall eatery, a laundromat), he inspects the people, the flora, the fauna, and the mechanistic devices and bends them into poetry. Blessed with the gift of simultaneous awareness of other creatures, other times, other gods, and the myriad possibilities emanating from each moment, his poems become tender, witty, and scary. In "Ars Poetica," for example, a bird going for its prey appears to be "a black line marked across the sky," and becomes poetry itself: "and I’ve always thought this is the way / the line should leave the page / with extended claws, a sweet and sudden rage."These are sexy poems, poems with attitude. Writing from the world we actually live in, he searches for scraps of wisdom and spirit, creating a book that is both political and deeply personal.Tony Barnstone, assistant professor of creative writing and English at Whittier College, is the author of Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry. His other books include Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei  (translated with Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (edited and translated with Chou Ping); and Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America (edited with Willis Barnstone).

Poetry

University Press of Florida

Richly painted, at times fantastical, fine art images of plants, animals, and people co-inhabit a dream-like world guiding tarot readers down a radiant path of awakening creativity and personal growth.\nThe creation of The Radiant Tarot deck was born from the author and artist’s years of working with archetypal images, the universal symbolic language. Sentient animal and plant kingdoms animate the artwork, honoring and acknowledging the interconnectedness of all life. The art is inspired by “Gaia mind,” where all creation’s forms—animal, vegetable, mineral—affect our precious planet in life-supporting ways.\nThe words of Rainer Maria Rilke “the animal world?beholds the Open” invite us to understand this renowned poet’s insistence that “one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning.” William Blake speaks of “animal forms of wisdom,” says that “Nature is Imagination itself.” It is the creative energy of these master artists drawn from the natural world that inspire The Radiant Tarot.

The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity (78 Cards, Full-Color Guide Book, Deluxe Keepsake Box)

Arts & Photography

Eldridge, Alexandra

Graphic Design

Weiser Books

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

GOLEM OF LOS ANGELES

Red Hen Press

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."

Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki

BkMk Press

Sad Jazz: Sonnets

Sheep Meadow Pr

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. --Ruth Stone "Plain-spoken and magical, this poet knows how to make imagination and the real world collide softly. 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 Komunyakaa

Beast in the Apartment

Sheep Meadow Press

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Books by Barnstone, Tony