An entertaining, definitive and in-depth study of prog rock, with a new cover and a foreword by Steve Hackett (Genesis). Progressive rock, a genre formed out of a creative surge in the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies. Made by young musicians for a young audience, prog music looked towards new horizons by synthesising rock, jazz, folk, classical and other styles. While prog has always divided critical opinion, in its heyday it had a large and devoted fanbase, and the era's biggest...

As Captain Beefheart Don Van Vliet recorded a series of albums from the late 1960s to the 1980s which marked out new boundaries for the avant garde of rock music. He then abandoned recording in favour of painting and quickly achieved an almost equal reputation with his figurative and expressionist oil paintings. As a musician Beefheart has been associated with psychedelia free jazz and rock n roll but it is with the blues that he has the greatest affinity. His highly individual vocal style hi...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TORONTO BOOK AWARDAS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS TV'S THE MORNING SHOWA CBC CANADIAN BOOK TO READ FOR MENTAL HEALTH WEEKDrawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer’s, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live wit...

"Fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors."—Toronto StarAt a psychiatric hospital in the eighties, patients formed what they called The Adjustment League to protect themselves against the depredations of a corrupt and abusive staff. Many years later, the leader of this group—a man known only as "The Super"— receives a letter leading to the discovery of a pornographic ring in need of "adjustment."Mike Barn...

“Barnes gets the story, and with the full participation of those brave musicians who attempted to interpret Beefheart's sometimes otherworldly methodology” The TimesThrough new interview material, and with reference to reports and eulogies that appeared in the media, Mike Barnes studies the star’s legacy putting the last two decades into context with the revelation of Van Vliet’s battle with MS.

Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award • One of CBC Books' Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the FallA poet recounts his experience with madness and explores the relationship between apprehension and imagination.In the summer of 1977, standing on a roadside somewhere between Dachau and Munich, twenty-two-year-old Mike Barnes experienced the dawning of the psychic break he’d been anticipating almost all his life. “Times over the years when I...

Shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award The poems in Calm Jazz Sea reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through m...

A memoir that chronicles unflinchingly the destructiveness of bipolar disorder - an illness that infiltrates thinking, feeling and acting in ways that change the very fabric of identity, of the life story one is telling oneself; however, The Lily Pond is equally searching in its exploration of the psyche's resources in healing and reknitting that story.

Shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award The poems in Calm Jazz Sea reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through m...

It is 1984. The latest recession is said to be over, and in the steel city of Hamilton, things are picking up. For Paul, however, an ex-rock guitarist and current art gallery attendant, life has slowed to the pace of a still life on a wall. He badly needs a jolt -- and he gets one. Soon after the arrival of an exhibition of Surrealist art, puzzles start to multiply around him. Before long, he is trying to find his way in a maze that includes a chess problem, violent death, Paul Klee, cocai...

"The Reasonable Ogre is a marvel, and a tribute to the power of story. The illustrations and language are so entwined as to be inseparable, and they cast a beautiful spell. Mike Barnes is a real fairy-tale creature."-Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, BirdIn the world of The Reasonable Ogre, magic is nothing if not paradoxical. Ogres can indeed be reasonable, prisons may prove porous, gifts often come disguised as curses, and springs gone dry are o...

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NELSON BALL PRIZE"In a dark time," wrote Theodore Roethke, "the eye begins to see"—and with Braille Rainbow, Mike Barnes reveals both darkness and the light that shines beyond it. Beginning with a suite of poems completed before and immediately following his admission to a psychiatric unit as a young man, Barnes's quiet lyricism and formal sensitivity capture those moments of perception that remind us how to see.Please note that the text of th...