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This Wound Is a World - Diverse Reads

This Wound Is a World

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The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States


“i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.

ISBN-13: 9781517908454

Media Type: Paperback(1)

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Publication Date: 09-03-2019

Pages: 72

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.50(d)

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. His second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, will be published in fall 2019.