Customer Reviews:

• "Luminous, haunting, evocative, Michelle Barnette's poems resonate. Certain lines bump around in my subconscious, trickle back in the stream of night. I have poem envy." - Kathleen Browning, author of Counting Sparrows

• "Bravo, Michelle! This is a terrific chapbook. You seem to know just the word to place in every spot all along the way. It's not at all the kind of poetry I write (not that I think everyone should write the way I do!), but I can certainly relate to the things you say. Write on!" - Deborah P. (Debby) Cooper

• "Michelle Barnette is a tough, graceful poet who looks at life without flinching. She is a veteran of a long, harrowing war, although battlefield lies not in Iraq but in her own body.

Having battled Parkinson’s disease for years, Barnette shares with the best soldiers a clear-eyed honesty, a courage born of facing the worst life can offer and surviving. And like these soldiers, her war has demanded sacrifices: her job, her career, her marriage. What she does not share with these warriors is a discharge date.

Barnette, of course, does not write about Parkinson’s disease in “Infinite Space,” winner of the Second Bi-annual Shadows Ink Publications Chapbook Competition. In each of the twenty-seven poems, however, she proves herself a battle-tested poet who has looked into the mouth of reality and not shied away. Nothing phony. No self-pity. No sentimentality.

No, there is no mention of Parkinson’s disease in “Infinite Space,” just a wealth of lines and images that surprise and delight. The title poem, “Infinite Space,” chimes in a minor key that ”A soul splayed by infinite space leaves/ a body feeling cold and naked, a piece of raw meat.” In “Beauty,” “We scoot backward like bugs”; make “dramatic leaps across the language barrier”; and watch a “row of small miracles coming undone.”

Obviously, Barnette knows loss: “It escaped even though/ I locked my diary with a key—/my girlhood got away from me” (“What I Lost”) and "I watch puffs of mist above the/ Smokies floating up/ like families of ghosts" (“Ghosts”).

The final haunting stanza of “Inheritance” is typical of Barnette’s vision:

My mother gave me
a tendency to cry,
a diamond ring,
a race to run,
complicated anger
with silence and goodbye;
but the heaviest,
the hardest thing
she left behind for me
is a longing for perfect love,
and worse than that—belief.

About her writing, Barnette says: 'I don’t want to alienate readers by writing about my own difficulty and suffering. I would hope to write larger than my own little life and get to something deeper, something everyone has a chance to understand. That’s why I write—to scratch the surface of this mysterious, evasive truth.'"- Dan Seiters