Reviews tagging 'Grief'

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

16 reviews

savvylit's review

emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

"To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance."

This brilliant book blends memoir with honest declarations about memory, indigenous & queer identity, and colonial systems. Belcourt's experience as a poet is instantly clear in the ways that he describes his life and the world around him. Several sentences stopped me in my tracks and made me have to pause to digest. Things like "sometimes I'm a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across" or "has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?" I'll keep thinking about A History of My Brief Body for a long, long time.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Homophobia, Grief, and Violence

scmiller's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Homophobia, Racism, Grief, Body shaming, and Genocide

Moderate: Mental illness, Abandonment, Classism, Child abuse, Hate crime, Medical content, Misogyny, Cultural appropriation, and Medical trauma

tenderbench's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative relaxing tense medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death, Sexual content, Colonisation, Grief, Suicidal thoughts, and Gun violence

maggiefae's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Grief, Homophobia, Mass/school shootings, Racism, Sexual content, Suicide, Transphobia, Colonisation, and Violence

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

ecn's review

Beautifully written and extremely flowery with such emotion and depth. I would have loved to listen to an audiobook version bc of this. The writing made it hard to follow at time because it was so flowery/intense but overall really wonderful 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia, Toxic relationship, Colonisation, Grief, Genocide, and Violence

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

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