Poet Mike Barnes has spent years caring for his mother, Mary, through the stages of moderate, severe, very severe and late-stage Alzheimer's. In an eloquent series of letters, addressed to an anonymous long-term dementia carer, he transforms his own increasingly challenging experience into a wellspring of clarity and understanding, support and solace.This is no ordinary practical care guide. Using bite-sized paragraphs perfectly designed for harried carers to dip into, Barnes tells ...

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...

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...

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.

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...

Since it was founded in 1982, The Wire magazine has covered a vast range of alternative, experimental, underground and non-mainstream music. Now some of that knowledge has been distilled into The Wire Primers: a comprehensive guide to the core recordings of some of the most visionary and inspiring, subversive and radical musicians on the planet, past and present. Each chapter surveys the musical universe of a particular artist, group or genre by way of a contextualizing i...

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...

“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.

Written between one January and the next, A Thaw Foretold is a passionate exploration of themes that are as timeless and recurrent as the seasons. In language that is both precisely vivid and particular, embracing both colloquial directness and formal elegance, the poems confront the elementals of love and loss, mortality and remembrance.

“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.