"Tongue of War": documents soldiers, sailors, sex slaves, nuclear bomb victims...Without the process of demonization, wars cannot be fought effectively. Dehumanizing the enemy is necessary in any war so that we can shoot, bomb or torture our opponents without pausing to see them for who they may be: fathers, mothers, husbands, dedicated teachers, or simple farmers.

Of course in a war such as World War II, where hostile nations such as Germany and Japan seek to take over and oppress with prejudice and without mercy, there is a definite right and wrong side. However, it is important to remember that on each side, regardless of the ideology of its leaders, stand human beings, many of them mere instruments of evil, or innocents caught in the maelstrom of events beyond their control.

Tongue of War, ten years in making, is a collection of carefully researched and masterfully presented voices of the participants of the Second World War, mostly in the Pacific theater. In this important and timely collection of poems, worthy of the National Book Award, Barnstone shape-shifts into Korean sex slaves, a sailor, a professor, Japanese and American soldiers, and victims of the nuclear attack, among others, presenting us their voices in their contemplation of events as they look back. These voices are not in accents or misspoken dialects, but in perfect English of an accomplished poet. Yet we never doubt that each voice belongs to one who speaks. In an era where we can fall into the trap of demonizing an entire people because of the actions of their government (i.e.: Iran) or a group of radical maniacs (i.e.: the Taliban and Al-Queda) Tongue of War is a touching, relevant and significant reminder that the road to peace has and will always begin with people who are willing to view each other as human beings, diverse in religion or culture but equal in spirit.

— Sholeh Wolpe

Everything about Tongue of War cuts against the current fashions. It is about war—in particular the war in the Pacific, which continues to haunt post-1945 American and Japanese cultures, the war from which many older men and women still have not returned ("There is the man in the war and, later, the war in the man."). It is written in forms, especially the sonnet. The meter, the pulse of human feeling unable to name itself, belies once again the notion that the music of poetry distorts rather than embodies and intensifies the real stuff of human experience. The diction and syntax are often blunt with the exhaustion and terror of human voices--American and Japanese, soldiers and civilians--struggling to articulate the unspeakable, to make visible that to which we have learned to blind ourselves. The voices are as various—guilt-ridden, cynical, stunned, meditative, angry, indifferent, traumatized, proud, regretful—as the nearly infinite shades of the war experience itself. Such is the power of Tongue of War that I cannot help but think that having read it, any American President might be less inclined to send young men and women off to face them.

—B.H. Fairchild

In the poem presented here from Tongue of War, "The Bataan Death March" refers to a war crime that happened in 1942. After the Japanese captured the Philippine island of Bataan, American and Filipino prisoners of war were marched 60 miles to prison camps. The Japanese soldiers brutalized the prisoners, deprived them of food and water, marched them to exhaustion, and casually killed thousands of them. More than a fourth of the 75,000 diseased, starved, and dehydrated prisoners died en route.

At the Retirement Home

I've had both knees replaced. I've got a steel
pin in my hip. I don't hear you so good,
but I'm not stupid, son. How would you feel,
surviving the Bataan Death March, no food
for days, no water, and the ones who fell
behind were bayoneted where they lay,
and now you're marching off to death? Real hell
is not old age, though. No, taking away
the rights we died for, saying torture's right,
that's hell. Hand me the iron and those shirts,
would you? Thanks, son. As long as I have fight
in me I'll love this country till it hurts.
And it does. This is worse than what I saw
overseas. Torture. In America.

(U.S. Soldier, 194th Armored Regiment, retired, Brainerd, Minnesota)

Poet Tony BarnstoneTony Barnstone's collections of poetry include Sad Jazz: Sonnets, Impure, The Golem of Los Angeles (winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry) and Tongue of War (winner the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry). Barnstone has edited and/or translated various books of Chinese poetry and prose, including Chinese Erotic Poems, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters, Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry and Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei. He has fellowships and poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Pushcart Prize. Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College.