Search results for ""author mike barnes""

An entertaining, definitive and in-depth study of prog rock, with a new cover and a foreword by Steve Hackett (Genesis).

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"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.

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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.

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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, cocaine, bikers, a strip club and its art-patron owner, and a host of clashing egos and agendas in the gallery. And then there is Claudia, a young artist with a quick brush and a caustic tongue, who may know more than she is saying about the mysteries Paul is chasing. Catalogue Raisonne is a novel about the mystery of art and the art of mystery, and the power of both to awaken sleeping senses.

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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 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.

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"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, Bird In 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.

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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.

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