Description

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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.

About the Author

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John Barton is the current Poet Laureate of Victoria, British Columbia. His eleven previous books of poetry and nine chapbooks include For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Polari, and Windsock. His critical works include Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007), The Malahat Review at 50, and The Essential Douglas LePan. He lives in Victoria.