GOLEM OF LOS ANGELES

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