Poetry. This book won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by B. H. Fairchild, who writes in his foreword, TONGUE OF WAR is one of the most distinctive manuscripts I have ever judged for a book prize (And it is a book rather than simply a collection). 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 that Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved.