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

adriftzoey

My body is the vehicle for transport, which means my heart is an engine.

Love, then, isn’t remotely about what we might lose when it inevitably dissipates. How unworkable love would be were we to subject it to a risk-cost benefits analysis!

Beck Krystal

 Confession: I'm not yet comfortable taking my shirt off in a poem. Subjectivity abuses. Subjectivity rescues. Men shoved my head into the clouds. 

I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. 

I’m a body of knowledge, not one of chemical compounds.

“Loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world"

i need to return to this sometime, i know that i wasn't in the right headspace to explore it's intricacies, gorgeous writing, emotionally provoking

August Stone

Erin G.

The dense, thesis-style language and citations really challenged me, on top of the brutal reality of the author's personal experience. His poetry, honesty about falling in love, health scares and the ways Canada has/is letting down Indigenous people were pretty uncomfortable but I am grateful to have been given this perspective.

I dived into this book not knowing what this is about. What shined at first was the sublime writing. Belcourt not only knows how to craft beautiful words, but also to infuse lots of meaning in them they're perfect mediums to convey the ineffables. I overstayed my visit on some sentences because they're just that delectable and reflective. The metaphors used shows us the bird eye view of some issues which is very effective and tempting to make me ponder about it in other (very loosely related) terms or from my own experiences. 

Each essay delved on varying topic from family relationship, love, queer and NDN identity, and experiences as a Canada citizen with those identities. From what i've seen as a foreigner, Canada seemed to successfully brand itself as a very chill and peaceful place. This book shows that it's not all that though, their government's in fact quite vicious to NDNs systemically. Other essays got more personal the book feels partly like a memoir. Some topics are so intimate I felt like i was intruding a personal space. It's informative and educational in a way that introduced me to kinds of feelings evoked in unfamiliar experiences (some happening behind closed doors). This was good and in a way, quite precious.

The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First 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.

Fraser Simons

Vulnerable and, of course, poetic. I found this to be a really compelling read, especially when narrated. There is a frank mode of explanation that speaks of lived experience growing up as a gay indigenous man in Canada, and how our society and culture directly affect him on a day-to-day basis. 

Topics range, and don’t feel like they have too much of a through line. The structure is probably the weakest link here, for me. But quite a few of these struck home and were quite moving. It’s well written, though uneven at times. I found it to be quite solid and comparable to other collections, where perhaps not everything discussed will be of interest or correlate to what was said previously, but I imagine there is something here for anybody to relate to. 

I think it might be a mixed bag for people in so far as how often he brings up other authors and their work, and how he relates to the work. He’s fairly alright at giving summaries of things discussed, but it’s obviously difficult and abstract if you haven’t read them yourself. I generally don’t like this kind of short hand… but neither is it un substantive. Fortunately I had read some of the references and in some cases it made me think a bit differently about them. 

Plenty here to recommend. For some reason I thought this was a poetry collection and so I’d been putting it off. Must have conflated it with something else. Well worth a read.

natalia 

Sage

Jules

Becca W

yousr abu sboulah

Antonia Di Castri

Jorge Amigo

daniela

Lisa Lindquist 

Jenelle andersen

Ellen Watters

Billy-Ray Bellcourt

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.

Jesse Morley

"An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength." --Kirkus Reviews, starred The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; 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

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