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A review by savvylit
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Grief, and Violence