Tony Barnstone – författare

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.The 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.The 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 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

Ranging from ancient Greece to the atom bomb, Tony Barnstone reveals how modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams pioneered "cyborg modernism"—a fusion of technoscience and the humanities that anticipates contemporary posthumanist theory.Barnstone argues that Williams, a true "poet of reality," deployed revolutionary cyborg esthetics that merged organic and mechanical elements, portraying humans as biomechanical hybrids while challenging traditional dualisms between mind and matter, human and machine. The study reveals how Williams transcended C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" divide, forging a synthetic approach that collapsed the artificial barriers between scientific and humanistic inquiry. Barnstone also argues that Williams' work engaged profoundly with the era's scientific advancements and anxieties.Through four interconnected sections—God Machines, Art Machines, Mind Machines, and War Machines—this book explores how Williams transformed the creative process itself, analogizing it to scientific method while fashioning art objects into "machines made out of words" that manifest geometric forms, machine motion, and probable outcomes. The Cyborg Modernism of William Carlos Williams unveils Williams' cyborg ideology that reimagined empathy as utility, seeking new forms of integrated thinking to counter the technoscientific horrors of world wars, death camps, and atomic bombs.

China has a strong and ancient tradition of erotic poetry by both men and women, and this unique collection includes poems from three thousand years ago to the present day, ranging from the highly literary to the sexually explicit - many of them appearing in English for the first time. While literary poets such as Zi Ye ('Lady Midnight') and Emperor Li Yu of the Tang Dynasty are already known in the West, popular Chinese verse has been largely ignored by translators. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping mine a richly erotic vein, uncovering ancient Chinese Daoist sex manuals, erotic novels and plays (which contain poems at moment of sexual epiphany); the tradition of erotic prints, which were often accompanied by poems; folksongs and bawdy jokes. The contrast between the discretion and subtlety of classical Chinese erotic poetry and the earthy comedy of its popular counterpart makes for a fascinating and entertaining anthology.