Billy-Ray Belcourt

A History of My Brief Body

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Billy-Ray Belcourt’s collection of personal essays opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile Cree Nation.

From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward.

With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

Author: Billy-Ray Belcourt

Paperback Published 4 May 2021 192 pages

This is not so much a memoir as it is a brilliant deconstruction of memoir itself. Within the hazardous worksite of language, Belcourt assembles a beautiful and haunting mosaic of what it means to be, to think, sing, fuck, and love in a queer and racialised body.-Omar Sakr

In sharp pieces infused with a yearning for decolonized love and freedom, Belcourt … ably balances poetic, philosophical, and political insights throughout this unique book... An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength.- Kirkus

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  • 5
    I will never be finished with this book

    Posted by Meg on 20th May 2022

    I ‘finished’ this book today, but I’m not sure I will ever (want to) be finished with this book. I read it in a time of queer grief, and the author, Billy-Ray Belcourt, puts things into words that seem unspeakable. When writing of the threat of homophobic violence he says ‘that night I sleep not with him [his then boyfriend] but with the thought of what they could have done to us, what they wanted to do to us.’ In another moment this may have been too much, but somehow I caught these words when they were a balm for me. Queer, Driftpile Cree Canadian, poet, academic, Billy-Ray is trying to write a future in which his joy is possible, in a present trying violently and repeatedly to strip him of humanity. He weaves through both the experience and politics of academia, gender, gay culture, literary criticism, ‘care’ and the health system, violence and suicide, media and law, all delicately and incisively. This should give an indication of the complexity of this book’s contribution. This is not to say the work feels heavy or laboured. I am so grateful Belcourt is a poet. He takes behemoth systems and puts them through his loom for readers, interpreting in a way that makes queer, feminist, decolonial futures almost imaginable. It’s rare I’m motivated to write reviews, but I had to capture some of the moment my world changed with this book, in the hope more people might share it.

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