Sleep is Now a Foreign Country by Mike Barnes
CBC Books | Posted: August 21, 2023 5:14 AM | Last Updated: October 12, 2023
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.
(From Biblioasis)
Mike Barnes is a dual Canadian-American citizen and has published eleven books across a range of genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. His previous nonfiction book was Be With: Letters to a Caregiver. Born in Rochester, Minnesota, he lives in Toronto.