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!

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. 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.