“The wonderful poems of Madeleine Barnes are lyrics, epistles, and prayers that, in addressing you, welcome you into her capacious heart. You become a lover, an eavesdropper, a friend, you become both the wounded and the one who wounds. These poems display miraculous intimacy and compassion. ‘Throw your voice into this valley and it comes back a mountain,’ Barnes writes. ‘You’ve done nothing unforgivable, say it. Transform many times.’” —TERRANCE HAYES

Madeleine Barnes is a writer, visual artist, and Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Baruch College, a recent Research Fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum, and a recent Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Fellow. She serves as editor-at-large at Cordella Press, a press that showcases the work of women and nonbinary creators. Her debut full-length poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was published by Trio House Press in 2020. She is also the author of four chapbooks: The Memory Dictionary (Ethel Press), Women’s Work (Tolsun Books), Light Experiments (Porkbelly Press), & The Mark My Body Draws in Light (Finishing Line Press). She has taught creative writing and research courses at New York University and Brooklyn College.

She is the recipient of a John Woods Scholarship, a Cohen Award for Travel, a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Poetry Prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and a Lost and Found Grant. She was named an Emerging Writer by the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series, and her work was featured in Frontier Poetry’s Exceptional Poetry from Around the Web series alongside poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In 2018 she received a fellowship to attend the Letterpress Printing & Fine Press Publishing Seminar For Emerging Writers at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Her artwork has been exhibited at venues like The Center for Book Arts, WORK Gallery, Future Tenant, The Frame Gallery, BOOM Concepts, and The Miller Gallery.

“Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson would have understood and loved Madeleine Barnes’s mesmerizing Women’s Work, a sequence of word-embroidered collages that demonstrate the meanings to be found in daily work of the hands, private work, sometimes supposedly dutiful work—the kind of finger-labor that leads to quiet insurrection and molten satisfaction.  Barnes, a gifted poet, critic, and artist, knows how to wield word and image to make magic happen, without undue hoopla, and with witty iconoclastic panache.” —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

“Women’s Work is a feast for the eyes and the heart. Akin to Jen Bervin’s stitch-erasure poems, Noako Fujimoto’s multi-layered emaki, and Catherine Bresner’s digital collages, Madeleine Barnes’s gorgeous interweaving of embroidery, found text, and public domain imagery investigates domesticity as conceit and constraint, exhibiting the wildness that hides behind facades of silence and obedience. This is poetry that showcases the kind of visionary imagination, subversion, and resourcefulness women and queer-identified artists have long cultivated out of necessity for survival. I adore the snarls of colorful thread and the spirit of sneaky sedition that grows with each flip of the page.” —GABRIELLE BATES

"Few people get a chance to see the back of a needlepoint canvas. It is a gift to explore so many of them here. The negative and fragmented realm of sewing is where Madeleine Barnes’s book dwells. Women’s Work is an example of poetry comics at its finest. It feels spontaneous, as well as purposeful, rebellious as well as honorific. Giving us a window into needlework’s chaotic qualities, Barnes zooms in on hidden fragments of a pastime that was, for centuries—and certainly still is for many in the world—a central element of women’s lives across all backgrounds. For good or for ill, she skillfully leaves the commentary up to us." —BIANCA STONE

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD, TRIO HOUSE PRESS, 2020

“In YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD Madeleine Barnes has crafted a beautiful and luminous book of lyrics out of the grit and gristle of lived experience. This ‘scarred’ yet ‘flowering’ collection is lit from within by the poet's fierce resilience and faith in the redemptive potential of love. Barnes is a poet who attends to the breaking and broken body while never losing sight of the ‘body’s impossible blessings.’ ‘Change is your flint/use it to renew,’ she writes, ‘Say it: / you want to live.’ I am grateful for Barnes’s powerful voice singing clear light into the darkness we inhabit. Hers is a searing, necessary debut.” —DEBORAH LANDAU

“Madeleine Barnes generously reaches toward painful places that many poets are afraid to touch. Organizing her her book around a sequence of absolving principles, she enacts a forgiveness journey, without false consolation; instead, she speaks in praise of tenacious embroidery, steadfast retrieval, destinationless self-assemblage, and a pleasing neutrality, as if she were looking at disaster, or at daily life, through a scrim that gave some of the sad information but kept the viewer safely unseen. The book, an artfully composed act of ambiguous witness, addresses a ‘you’—a compassionate reader who will feel, as I do, grateful to Barnes for her high level of craft, wisdom, and emotional resourcefulness.” —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

“A wonderfully idiosyncratic logic animates Madeleine Barnes's debut collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good: half spirit, half inner speech. The poems take shape in the space between the dystopia of a real world and the utopia of a world the speaker longs for and valiantly wills into being: ‘I wish the sirens were remnants of churchbells, cymbals, second-hand static,’ she says. Caritas and death confront each other in ‘the sting of how easily we are forgotten.’ Through the poem ‘Vulnerary,’ I learned that a ‘vulnerary’ is something used to heal a wound, a definition that also applies to this powerful new voice.” —CATHERINE BARNETT

Light Experiments

Light Experiments is Porkbelly Press’ first ever zine-style photo chapbook. It recently went into second edition printing!

DEBORAH LANDAU: "Light Experiments is an extraordinary work of art —stunning, eerie, and powerfully evocative. Madeleine Barnes is a singular talent.”

CATHERINE BARNETT: “Given that nothing can travel faster than light, these arresting images are also meditations on time, full of beauty and disquiet, full of stories not yet fully illuminated but discovered and expressed in Madeleine Barnes’s radiant poetic intuition.”

BARBARA HENRY, Master Printer, Center for Book Arts: “Light Experiments joins the structure of the book, as a journey in time, with the photograph, as a record of light, to illuminate the mysteries of the human condition.”

THE MARK MY BODY DRAWS IN LIGHT

TERRANCE HAYES: “The Mark My Body Draws In Light often speaks directly to you. ‘You are speaking with your fingertips,’ ‘Your tired brain floats above you,’ ‘you have quarters for a song…’ The wonderful poems of Madeleine Barnes are lyrics, epistles, and prayers that, in addressing you, welcome you into her capacious heart. You become a lover, an eavesdropper, a friend, you become both the wounded and the one who wounds. These poems display miraculous intimacy and compassion. ‘Throw your voice into this valley and it comes back a mountain,’ Barnes writes. ‘You’ve done nothing unforgivable, say it. Transform many times.’”

JIM DANIELS: “This debut collection exudes the confidence and nuance–the craft–of a veteran poet.  The quiet passion and intimate grace of these poems plant us firmly in the physical world as one remarkable image after another blossoms around us.  Exquisite.  Lush.  Big poems about smallness–everything we don’t notice, but should.  Their evocative furious dreaming flashes across the pages like the arced lightning of the heart.”