Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

44 reviews

sydapel's review

challenging reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

I feel totally unmoored by this book. The writing is profoundly and intimately reflective, almost volatile in the pace it takes, swinging from rage to sorrow to longing to adoration so quickly. Belcourt speaks so profoundly about queerness, indigenous oppression in the Americas and his personal journey as a writer in these spaces. This is one of those books that requires slow reading and forces you to take a step back. The subject matter is difficult at times, but the number of quotes that will stay with me make it worth it. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content and Colonisation

Moderate: Homophobia, Mass/school shootings, and Transphobia

Minor: Suicide and Suicide attempt

dominic_t's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

This book is really great and thought-provoking. His prose is beautiful and dense. I found some of it hard to wrap my head around, and I wish I had read this with other people so I could discuss it and understand more of it. He shows really clearly that the colonization of Canada has never stopped, even though white settlers pretend that colonization is all in the past. He discusses Indigenous trauma, resistance, and joy, and his writing is beautiful. This isn't an easy read, but it is worth it.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, Suicide, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Murder

Trauma, residential schools

jessie_h's review

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

This is one of those essay collections that I will stick be thinking about for a while. There is a lot in this collection to unpack and it was so beautifully written. Belcourt leans on his poetic background to tell parts of his story via essays and poems which results in an emotional sucker punch of a memoir. He touches on topics like queerness, indigeneity, sexuality, queer/NDN joy and hope, and colonialism and does so with a vulnerability and honesty. I want to read more from this author in the future.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Homophobia, Suicide, Racism, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Grief, Sexual content, and Cultural appropriation

Minor: Violence, Hate crime, Gun violence, Murder, and Genocide

readingwithkaitlyn's review

emotional reflective slow-paced

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Racism, and Sexual assault

Moderate: Homophobia, Mental illness, Medical content, Grief, Death, Hate crime, Genocide, Colonisation, Gun violence, Murder, Blood, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma, Violence, Suicide attempt, and Police brutality

Minor: Infidelity, Rape, and Transphobia

biab00's review

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

The governing thesis of my book would be that we aren’t noble people and therefore the fact of our living is something to be ashamed of. The question I’d ask: What might it look like for NDNs to refuse life in the wake of all that’s happened to us in a country in which we’re social experiments before all else?

I choose this quote to put in the review, but to be fair there are so many beautiful ones that it was hard to choose one. 
This book is so poetic and aaaaa I don't even have words to describe it. 
If you are a fan of Siken and Ocean Vuong I definitely recommend this one.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Homophobia, Colonisation, Murder, and Suicide

balfies's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

This lyrical, intricate memoir of queer Cree resistance made me weep. It also made me want to write poetry again.

Belcourt uses language to charter unnavigable oceans of queer and NDN experience within a capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. 

Feel like I'm a bug on a forest floor with my mouth open in nutrient rich dirt, there's so much going on in this. If you're a fan of Ocean Vuong or Ellen van Neerven this is a must.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Colonisation, Violence, Sexual content, Suicide, Racism, Murder, Grief, and Homophobia

moranguinhos's review

challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Transphobia, Colonisation, Gun violence, Murder, Police brutality, Homophobia, Grief, Hate crime, Racism, and Suicide

lilypad537's review

emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content

Moderate: Suicide, Colonisation, Racism, and Mass/school shootings

h0llyr00th's review

challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

Dark but beautiful. Ruminations on existing as NDN, as queer, as other in what's known as Canada. Every content warning.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Transphobia, Racism, Suicide, and Grief

robotswithpersonality's review against another edition

challenging hopeful

A galvanizing series of essays that blur the line between memoir and think piece. The author is palpably a poet, in that I struggled to adapt to his gorgeously complex phrasing, but found it all the more affecting and informative for not coddling the reader. 
It is heartening to see Belcourt push towards a future of creative joy, while consistently elucidating all the ways in which the Canada of the past and present hampers the possibility of such a life experience for Indigenous people. 
Discussions of life as a queer man of colour likewise indicates the striving for love and the social and structural impediments to finding it. 
It is enjoyable to see a writer frequently touch on a sentence or two written by others, you get this sense of collaborative inspiration, of sharing ideas, when otherwise I worry that writing is isolating, in the search for a 'pure' inspiration not to be intermingled with words that might be claimed by another.
I think it's because I usually see it in research/journalistic non-fiction, seeing citation/quotes in a memoir provides hope of a full life,  reading and discussion between fellow writers. 
As with other non-fiction personal works written by Black, Indigenous and people of colour I have encountered as a white reader, I am reminded that reading alone will not suffice. Action must be taken, so that the liveable future so many minorities have long been fighting for and creating art to encourage into existence may become a reality, via the restructure of systems, (as well as hearts and minds), long incapable and seemingly uncaring, of meeting all citizens' needs. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Homophobia, Racism, Hate crime, Suicide, and Suicidal thoughts