Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki

This book, which won the John Cairdi Prize for Poetry, selected by B. H. Fairchild, is inspired by historical situations and accounts letters, oral histories, news reports, etc., of individuals from both sides of the Pacific theater of World War II, including the home fronts. 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, ''Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved.''