Pulp Sonnets
by Tony Barnstone, illustrated by Amin Mansouri
$20.95
“You don’t think poetry can be as sexy, violent, terrifying, and shocking as that stuff you read when no one else is looking? Guess again. Tony Barnstone’s Pulp Sonnets is fantastic in every sense of the word, the work of someone with an equal love and knowledge of poetry and great genre storytelling. Amin Mansouri’s artwork is gorgeous, reminiscent of both Dave McKean and Ralph Steadman, and worth the price of admission on its own. This book will beat up all the other books on your poetry shelf. Buy it.”
— David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, creators, screenwriters, and executive producers of the HBO series, Game of Thrones
Format: paperback
Out of stock
“Tony Barnstone plumbs the deceptively shallow depths of pulp genres in these funny, slightly racy sonnets. Here, lowbrow action meets highbrow poetic, frosted with psychological antics. Barnstone pulls us into a tug-of-war between generic expectation, poetic license, and suspension of disbelief. Comics, B movies, sci-fi, and detective fiction act as narrative mannequins in which to meta-gaze the limits and possibilities of genre. Kitschy killjoys, frigid femme fatales, and naughty night creatures conspire to help us along the way.” — Renoir Gaither, Rain Taxi
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!
Advance Praise:
“You don’t think poetry can be as sexy, violent, terrifying, and shocking as that stuff you read when no one else is looking? Guess again. Tony Barnstone’s Pulp Sonnets is fantastic in every sense of the word, the work of someone with an equal love and knowledge of poetry and great genre storytelling. Amin Mansouri’s artwork is gorgeous, reminiscent of both Dave McKean and Ralph Steadman, and worth the price of admission on its own. This book will beat up all the other books on your poetry shelf. Buy it.” — David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, creators, screenwriters, and executive producers of the HBO series, Game of Thrones
“Tony Barnstone takes a walk on the wild side, the darkest dark of the wild side, and stabs us with his manic sonnets of gore, tossing up the meat we call human before taking it down with his forked tongue. Deviant artist Amin Mansouri favors the small bones of large, expressive hands and feet that dwarf his elegant figures, making them seem all too naked and vulnerable. This oddly erotic and delectable poetic nightmare has a thousand eyes.”
— Dorianne Laux, poet, author most recently of The Book of Women
Tupelo Press is pleased to provide the Pulp Sonnets Teaching Guide in free, downloadable PDF format. (1.1Mb)
About the Author:
The son of a poet and visual artist, Tony Barnstone was born in Connecticut and raised in Indiana, Vermont, and Greece. As a poet, translator, editor, and fiction writer, he is the author of seventeen books and a music CD. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Poets’ Prize, the John Ciardi Prize, the Benjamin Saltman Prize, and the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival. He lived for years in Spain, Greece, Kenya, and China and currently resides in California, where he is the Albert Upton Professor and chair of English at Whittier College.
About the Illustrator:
Amin Mansouri is an illustrator, photographer, poet, and professor at the University of Iran, in Applied Science and Technology. He has taught painting and photography in his atelier for ten years, and he has published six books of self-illustrated poetry. Ten individual exhibitions of his work have appeared in Australia and Iran, and his work has been featured in more than seventy international group exhibitions.
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
A Back Alley in Honningsvåg
An old drunk sailor, sleeping in his boots,
is catching tigers in red weather, while
nearby a squalling yellow kitten roots
through black-bagged garbage. I try to dial
headquarters on my secret wristwatch phone.
The signal’s dead, as dead as Sven and Jan,
my contacts, sliced like reindeer meat. Alone
of all my crew, I got out of Sudan,
for what? To die in Norway? One more body
run through the saws inside the factory.
and canned? I’d like to understand. I’m nobody,
but who are you, assassin? Mystery,
it’s all a mystery. The film is cut.
Thrashing awake, the sailor mumbles, “What?”
