This Wound Is a World
This poetry collection reconnects the body, desire, pain, and colonial memory of a queer Indigenous man through a voice that is both prayerful and critically alert. It opens personal wounds onto the structures of the world and offers love and sex as forms of resistance toward the future.
Work Information
From personal wounds, the poems open a world that reconsiders colonialism and the possibilities of love.
This Wound Is a World is Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut collection, bringing together Cree identity, queer embodiment, loss, and desire. Moving across poetry, manifesto, memoir, and critique, it examines how colonialism and sexual norms shape bodies in the present while still holding love up as a way toward the future. No Japanese edition was confirmed.
Review Summaries
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The collection is often received for the way lyric intensity coexists with theoretical sharpness. Rather than closing pain into confession, it expands it into questions of community and history, giving the poems their contemporary force.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Minnesota Pr
- Published
- 2019-09-03
- Pages
- 61 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781517908454
- ISBN-10
- 1517908450
- Category
- 洋書/History/Americas/Canada/First Nations
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States “i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World , is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.” Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. His second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field , will be published in fall 2019.
Reviews
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I'd like to start with the fact that it's been so long since I've read a collection of poems that I wanted to savour and even as I got to the Epilogue (which I loved, dearly, because of the reference to Cvetkovich's essay that I studied in a class I was absolutely blown away by this semester), I knew it would the first of many times I'd read it. The poems were varying in their forms and styles and the content matched the poetic line of its page and there was a natural cadence to each as I'd read them under my breath because poetry is meant to live off the page and sit happily on our lips, in our bodies, in our hearts – that's why I love it so much, it's more than just the words, it's the feelings they evoke and I swear nothing carries emotion better than good poetry. But this is great poetry, and it reached into me and drew feelings I thought I'd stopped feelings and made room for new ones. I've been meaning to read this collection of poems for so long that I was a little afraid of how much of an impact it would have on me when I finally did. I'm a firm believer in the idea that there is a time and place for each work of literature one consumes and I can strongly say that this was the right book at the right moment. This book is probably means (and is going to mean) so many different things to the audience that reaches and that's the beauty of it. The author explores his identity and doesn't alienate in the process, it's a journey of self-discovery and reflection invites the reader to do some inner work. These poems don't claim to heal, but they can definitely lead the way to a hopeful start.
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Billy Ray-Belcourt has delivered a stunning and powerful collection of poems. The poems are saturated with a sadness and self awareness about the affective condition of indigeneity that shook me to my core. Deep resonance with Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return. The introduction and epilogue are as moving as the poems and Belcourt doesn't shy away from the sadness of the work but instead insists that we might read sadness as itself a condition of possibility for a different, deeper kind of relationality beyond coloniality.
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This is not just a book, but many pieces of soul waved like a dreamcatcher's web and truthfully shared without dulling, diluting or exaggerating any colour, any shade of truth. YOU MUST READ IT: you'll feel those poems deep in your bones days after reading them.
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Love the poet’s way with words.
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Glad to finally have a copy, love this poet.