A bold experiment in autobiography, Lost Family: A Memoir is a book of sonnets that centres around the deaths of John Barton’s mother and sister, but tracks much of the poet’s early life in Alberta through to a conflicted, restless adulthood. Alongside tales of love, friends and mentors, intolerance, AIDS, and the struggle for equality, Barton’s collection—his first in eight years—explores how being gay rewrites and expands one’s sense of lineage, both inherited and chosen. A book of penetrating self-awareness and humility, marked by powerful image-making, Lost Family: A Memoir is a profound test of poetry’s ability to give coherence to life. It is also a celebration of the sonnet form, that finely made reliquary that permits memory to take shape.
