Abstract
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.