Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt's collection of personal essays opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile Cree Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

A History of My Brief Body

"Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to 'cut a hole in the sky to world inside.' Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems and essays upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where 'everyone is at least a little gay.'"--

Poems

This Wound is a World

A Novel

A Minor Chorus

In the follow-up to his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection, This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt aims more of an anthropological eye at the contours of NDN and queer social worlds to spot the much that is left unsaid when we look only to the mainstream media. In this genre-bending work, Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibility bubbling up everywhere NDNs are. Part One examines the rhythms of everyday life, which include the terrible beauty of the reserve, the afterlives of history, and the grammar of anal sex. Part Two experiments with form and practice, putting to use, for example, a mode of documentary poetics that unearths the logics that make and unmake texts like Treaty 8. NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field emerges out of a form of auto/ethnographic sensibility that is at turns campy and playful, jarring and candid, displaying, once again, the writer's extraordinary craft, guile, audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.

Notes from the Field

Ndn Coping Mechanisms

Superbly rendered portraits of modern indigeneity from the acclaimed author of A Minor Chorus.

Stories

Coexistence

Intan Paramaditha

Adania Shibli

Besufekad

The German word Freiraum, literally translated, means free room. Freiraum is more than just physical space though, it is also a mental state of creativity and freedom. In 1929 Virginia Woolf argued for the necessity of a "room of one’s own" for women writers: Freiraum, both literal and figurative, to think and to create. Almost a century later, having a private room is still a privilege, not only but especially for women. A virus knowing no boundaries or borders emphasized this inequality, making obvious the fierce competition for whose space is whose. Which public does this public space belong to, what are its rules, and how are they policed? Unspoken questions that are revitalizing gated communities and exclusionary zoning around the world. Who gets to claim and define public spaces? Whose rules determine how space is used and shared? How does identity shape our experience of space? With texts by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Besufekad, Intan Paramaditha, Adania Shibli. A publication of the Literary Colloquium Berlin with the kind support of the German Federal Foreign Office. The editor Priya Basil is a writer and activist. In her book "Be My Guest" she connects stories about her family’s Indian-Kenyan traditions, her British heritage and life in Germany to make a passionate plea for hospitality in Europe. Her essays have been widely published, including in Lettre International, Die Zeit and The Guardian. She is co-founder and board member of the NGO WIR MACHEN DAS. Priya is also on the advisory board of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights. In 2017, she initiated and remains actively engaged with a campaign for a European Public Holiday across the continent. Her film-essay "Locked In and Out", exploring questions around citizenship, coloniality and memory culture, premiered on 16th December 2020 at the digital opening of the Humboldt Forum and is now available to watch on YouTube. Her latest book "In Us and Now, Becoming Feminist" (Suhrkamp, 2021) once again powerfully blends the personal and political.

On the politics and poetry of space

Room. Make or take?

Longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief. In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

A Minor Chorus: A Novel

"In the follow-up to his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection, This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt aims more of an anthropological eye at the contours of NDN and queer social worlds to spot the much that is left unsaid when we look only to the mainstream media. In this genre-bending work, Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibility bubbling up everywhere NDNs are. Part One examines the rhythms of everyday life, which include the terrible beauty of the reserve, the afterlives of history, and the grammar of anal sex. Part Two experiments with form and practice, putting to use, for example, a mode of documentary poetics that unearths the logics that make and unmake texts like Treaty 8. NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field emerges out of a form of auto/ethnographic sensibility that is at turns campy and playful, jarring and candid, displaying, once again, the writer's extraordinary craft, guile, audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination."--

Billy-Ray Belcourt

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