Thaw Foretold

Mike Barnes: Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Aquarium, winner of the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of stories by a Canadian, The Syllabus, a novel, and the short fiction collection Contrary Angel. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He lives in Toronto.

"Thus the threat Barnes is always alluding to, the threat that permeates this collection, is tempered by human conversation, is held at bay by what two lovers say to one another. Thus there is anecdote, skeins of anecdote, punctuated by and ultimately capped with lyric. In this way Barnes arrests by variation."&#8212Fiddlehead "The poems in the collection don't all fit perfectly but most do, engaging and challenging in equal measure, many of the poems demanding a second and further readings, bringing the reader back time and again to flick through the pages and join the poet on his journey through shared emotional seasons."&#8212L.K. Robinson