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A History of My Brief Body
a collection of essays by Billy-Ray Belcourt
July 14, 2020 | 9781937512934 | 142 pages | Gate-fold
"Billy-Ray Belcourt exposes colonialism's historical and ongoing brutality against both the North American Indigenous and queer experiences. Through theory, memoir, and poetry, Belcourt notates an "archive of injuries" to then shape joy beyond known parameters. These essays are a glorious way to be held accountable. Bill-Ray Belcourt writes for his body, his being; read for yours."
— Heidi Birchler, Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis, MN)
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.
Read more about the book here.
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"A History of My Brief Body" is a storm raging at the crossroads of post-structuralist, decolonial, and queer theory. Here, is a catalog of the abuses levied against brown and queer bodies by a monolith of past and present. Here, also, is a litany towards the unmaking of these abusive structures. Billy-Ray Belcourt commands a sophisticated range of politics and philosophy, presented here with prose as brutal in truth as it is beautiful in form. The result is a moving swirl of personal artifacts, salvaged from and brought to bear against a persistent, callous history in the pursuit of a compassionate, emancipated future."
—Connor Mason, Book Loft (Columbus, OH)
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Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of the poetry collections NDN Coping Mechanisms and This Wound Is a World, which was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. In 2018, Belcourt was named by CBC Books as one of “14 Canadian poets to watch,” one of “18 emerging writers to watch,” a “Writer to know,” and one of “ten young Canadians to watch” by the CBC. A History of My Brief Body marks his non-fiction debut.
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