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.
"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."--
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
