Impure
- List Price: $10.95
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida
- Publish date: 08/01/1999
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.