Lost Family: A Memoir

A bold experiment in autobiography, Lost Family: A Memoir is a book of sonnets that centres around the deaths of John Barton’s parents and sister, but also tracks much of the poet’s early life in Alberta through to a complicated, restless adulthood. Alongside accounts of love, friends and heroes, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection of poems—his first in six years—explores how being queer rewrites and expands society’s sense of lineage, both given and chosen.

Reviews

“[The book] excels as a collection of poems drawn from and exploring the whole range of the poet’s inner and outer life and the public events and movements he has witnessed or taken part in. It is fascinating, well-wrought, often moving and very readable — provided you give it the slow, careful reading it deserves.” – Christopher Levenson, The Ormsby Review