Mike Barnes – författare

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 this book is not produced in braille.

Drawing 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 with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace—and, ultimately, inspiration.

Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award • One of CBC Books'' Canadian Nonfiction to Read in the Fall

A 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 have tried to describe what followed,” he writes of that moment, “it has always come out wrong.” In this finely wrought, deeply intelligent memoir of madness, its antecedents and its aftermath, Barnes reconstructs instead what led him to that moment and offers with his characteristic generosity and candor the captivating account of a mind restlessly aware of itself.

"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 only waiting to resurface. At once comic and moving, troubling and restorative, Mike Barnes’s original stories are here to remind us that fairy tales aren’t about the happily-ever-after: they’re about the strange detours we take trying to get there. With seventy drawings from the striking brush of Segbingway.

Mike Barnes is the author of The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth, and Metamorphosis, two novels, two volumes of poetry, and two short fiction collections.

Segbingway is an artist who lives in Toronto.