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"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."--
About the author
Mike Barnes is the author of twelve books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. He has won the Danuta Gleed Award and a National Magazine Award Silver Medal for his short fiction, and the Edna Staebler Award for his photo-and-text essay “Asylum Walk.” His most recent book of nonfiction,
Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award and has been praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” He lives in Toronto.
Summary
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.
Foreword
- Print run: 5,000
- Co-op available
- Advance reader copies
- Edelweiss digital review copies
- North American TV & radio campaign
- Online and social media campaign and giveaways.
- Excerpts in LitHub, Electric Lit
- Key audience outreach: mental health interest and media
Additional text
Praise for Mike Barnes
“(ideas of reference) is an intricately structured rendering of madness and memory, a mix of hallucination and dense, concrete realism, which only makes the phantasmagoria of illusion all the more poignant. This is an amazing work—supremely intelligent, coolly self-analytical, eerie, melancholy, revelatory and terrifying.”
—Douglas Glover, winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Elle
“Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.”
—Margaret Atwood on Twitter
“Masterful … The Adjustment League is suspenseful, exquisitely written and—at times—corrosively funny.”
—Maclean’s
“Fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors.”
—Toronto Star
“Poetically compelling and evocative … The Lily Pond is the ultimate act of recollection.”
—Quill and Quire
