Mike Barnes' Braille Rainbow is about perception across the sensory spectrum and the arc of learning about the world and about oneself. These poems, organized in four sections, engage first with infant appetites, others, and social justice, before turning inward to traverse the perilous heights and depths of the mind, drawing on Barnes' own experience of mental illness and his years of caring for his mother in her dementia. The latter half of the book addresses shifts in ways of thinking and feeling that allow contraries to meet and inform one another, and concludes with poems of peace and nourishing meditative connection.
