The Idea of an Entire Life - (Raised Voices) by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Paperback)

About the Book

"A powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide"--

Book Synopsis

From award-winning Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, a dazzling exploration of love, anguish, queerness, and Indigenous resistance in the 21st century

Queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide. Rigorous in research and thought yet accessible in language and imagery, this collection weaves lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine the delicate facets of queer Indigeneity.

Belcourt contends with the afterlife of what he calls "the long twentieth century," a period marked by assaults on Indigenous life, and his people's enduring resistance. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, are marked by the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt's body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.

His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history--and yet pulled toward a more flourishing future.

Review Quotes

"To read Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as 'line break', infrastructure as 'wound, ' 'an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.' These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what's already broken, breaking in real-time, 'in order to repair it.' How this new form might arrive--'miraculously' but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that's ongoing, 'meandering' but also (always) 'incomplete'--becomes what happens when we read."
--Bhanu Kapil

"This was beautiful. I am wowed, again. There were moments when I lost my breath. The Idea of an Entire Life engineers a lexicon for us to decipher what it means to be wedged between a staling futurism and the em dash of colonial chronicle. Where the body is a poem and the poetics of embodiment are found in grammatology: in the enjambment of a horizon 'between me and my ancestors, ' here a semicolon proceeds finality in asking 'what if when my life ends there is still more life, ' and the queer Indigenous rite that with a huffing comma we 'continue living.' Belcourt creates a blueprint, mapped on waxy, hard ground, the world the stylus etching out designs beneath: quotidian utopias, reverberant chambers, the portcullis of history, the choreography of a bedroom. And I, too, like Belcourt, peek from the margins and of his sonnet weave a wave."
--Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land

"The Idea of an Entire Life reaches toward the edge of language and returns to us a map of becoming. These poems slip between forms, between ache and awe, between theory and touch. The book is an homage to and a field guide for a queer Indigenous past, present, and future. Just when I needed something to survive the world now, Belcourt offers us a vision where life might be something tender, magic, and deeply radiant."
--Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

About the Author

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta, Canada. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of six books, three poetry and three prose. He has won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound is a World, and has been nominated twice for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General's Literary Award. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nikan, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.