Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.43 AVERAGE
4.43 AVERAGE
I'm never not floored when I read something by Billy-Ray Belcourt.
What more can I say than Billy-Ray just "gets it" when it comes to when and where to deploy his myriad of tools? Funny in places, heart rending in others, it's hard to put into words what an experience reading this book was.
What more can I say than Billy-Ray just "gets it" when it comes to when and where to deploy his myriad of tools? Funny in places, heart rending in others, it's hard to put into words what an experience reading this book was.
“I believe I exist. / To live, one can be neither / more nor less hungry than that. / I believe I existed. / One can’t be hungrier than that.”
A poignant and moving follow up to Belcourt’s first poetry collection.
A poignant and moving follow up to Belcourt’s first poetry collection.
A radical intervention into language, "I", land, body, queer history, utopian politics, Canada as ideology and history, and indigeneity as history and future.
There are speeches and demands, love songs and intimate whispers throughout the collection. Belcourt is in conversation with other radical, queer, Indigenous writers, uplifting them with the spirit of melancholy as well as of future joy. He is in conversation with himself:
"Nothingness is a world unto itself" meets with "...loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world..."
which talk to the dual revolutionary image of "The future's a bed of dawn I plant fists in" and "...those of the reserve are synced to a choreography of alternatives, of revolutionary effect... When the day ends, so too does Canada."
Belcourt mourns and founds possibility all at once. The melancholy of history is vital to these works. The deaths of Indigenous people, the brutality of settler colonialism, and the injustice of the AIDS epidemic are woven deeply into the poems he writes. Recognition of history creates both the self and the sense of possibility, even though the present effaces.
I believe I exist.
To live, one can be neither
more nor less hungry than that.
I believe I have existed.
One can't be left hungrier than that.
The second of two parts allowed for fragmentary ideas to build to something stronger. At times, I hovered on the surface of lines and couldn't get into them, or wasn't sure that the more I wanted was there. The book is an unexpected collage of scholarly theorizing and rude satire that wasn't always (middle-)grounded.
Overall, I appreciate Belcourt's voice and vision in a growing canon of Indigenous literature on the land we currently call Canada.
Those I liked best were:
I Become Less...
At the Mercy of the Sky
Duplex
NDN Homo Sonnet
Ars Poetica
Melancholy's Forms
Red Utopia
Notes from the Field
There are speeches and demands, love songs and intimate whispers throughout the collection. Belcourt is in conversation with other radical, queer, Indigenous writers, uplifting them with the spirit of melancholy as well as of future joy. He is in conversation with himself:
"Nothingness is a world unto itself" meets with "...loneliness is a kind of dysphoria with the world..."
which talk to the dual revolutionary image of "The future's a bed of dawn I plant fists in" and "...those of the reserve are synced to a choreography of alternatives, of revolutionary effect... When the day ends, so too does Canada."
Belcourt mourns and founds possibility all at once. The melancholy of history is vital to these works. The deaths of Indigenous people, the brutality of settler colonialism, and the injustice of the AIDS epidemic are woven deeply into the poems he writes. Recognition of history creates both the self and the sense of possibility, even though the present effaces.
I believe I exist.
To live, one can be neither
more nor less hungry than that.
I believe I have existed.
One can't be left hungrier than that.
The second of two parts allowed for fragmentary ideas to build to something stronger. At times, I hovered on the surface of lines and couldn't get into them, or wasn't sure that the more I wanted was there. The book is an unexpected collage of scholarly theorizing and rude satire that wasn't always (middle-)grounded.
Overall, I appreciate Belcourt's voice and vision in a growing canon of Indigenous literature on the land we currently call Canada.
Those I liked best were:
I Become Less...
At the Mercy of the Sky
Duplex
NDN Homo Sonnet
Ars Poetica
Melancholy's Forms
Red Utopia
Notes from the Field
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
wow… the way I am not going to stop talking about this collection of poems 😮💨 Belcourt is really a marvel. to so perfectly mix deeply emotional content with discussions of pop culture and somehow make it all work… amazing. I would recommend this to ANYONE but especially those who enjoy Vuong’s work
This is a hard book to review. Some poems were absolutely perfect, and some didn’t speak to me at all.
It loses at least one star for including a poem (Flesh) inspired by a 1986 book by Walter Lee Williams, who, in 2015, was added to the FBI Most Wanted List, was arrested and pled guilty to multiple sex crimes involving children.
It loses at least one star for including a poem (Flesh) inspired by a 1986 book by Walter Lee Williams, who, in 2015, was added to the FBI Most Wanted List, was arrested and pled guilty to multiple sex crimes involving children.
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced