A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance
In The Idea of an Entire Life, queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide.
Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. He contends with the afterlife of he calls "the long twentieth century," a century marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples’ enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, put to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.
His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history and pulled toward a more flourishing future.
“To read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as ‘line break’, infrastructure as ‘wound,’ ‘an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.’ These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real-time, ‘in order to repair it.’ How this new form might arrive—‘miraculously’ but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that’s ongoing, ‘meandering’ but also (always) ‘incomplete’—becomes what happens when we read.” —Bhanu Kapil
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta, Canada. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of six books, three poetry and three prose. He has won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound is a World, and has been nominated twice for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nikan, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance
In The Idea of an Entire Life, queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide.
Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. He contends with the afterlife of he calls "the long twentieth century," a century marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples’ enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, put to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.
His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history and pulled toward a more flourishing future.
Praise
“To read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as ‘line break’, infrastructure as ‘wound,’ ‘an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.’ These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real-time, ‘in order to repair it.’ How this new form might arrive—‘miraculously’ but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that’s ongoing, ‘meandering’ but also (always) ‘incomplete’—becomes what happens when we read.” —Bhanu Kapil
Author
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta, Canada. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of six books, three poetry and three prose. He has won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound is a World, and has been nominated twice for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nikan, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
