ideas of reference

(Paperback)

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Description

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 hed 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.

Reviews

Praise for (ideas of reference)

"As riveting as it is terrifying, as mysterious as it is illuminating, Mike Barnes's (ideas of reference) takes us inside the claustrophobic, kaleidoscopic world of madness. Like a sedimentary rock, layers of meaning are stacked upon one another inside its slim pages, building a structure so unlike any other book that you can't put it down without being changed."
Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

(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 worksupremely intelligent, coolly self-analytical, eerie, melancholy, revelatory and terrifying.
Douglas Glover, winner of the Governor-Generals Award for Elle

Praise for Mike Barnes

Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.
Margaret Atwood on Twitter

Masterful The Adjustment League is suspenseful, exquisitely written andat timescorrosively funny.
Macleans

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

Author Bio

Mike Barnes, a dual Canadian-American citizen, has published eleven books across a range of genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. His last nonfiction book, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, has been praised by Margaret Atwood as Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate. Born in Rochester, Minnesota, he lives in Toronto.