Elissa Washuta
This brilliant book is endlessly giving, lingering in tight spaces within the forms of loneliness, showing us their contours. These poems do the necessary work of negotiating with the heart-killing present from which we imagine and make Indigenous futures. Every line feels like a possible way out of despair.
Mercedes Eng
NDN Coping Mechanisms is a haunting book that dreams a new world — a ‘holy place filled with NDN girls, hair wet with utopia’ — as it simultaneously excoriates the world that ‘is a wound’ and the historic and present modalities of violence against Indigenous peoples under Canadian settler colonialism. Belcourt considers the genocidal nation-state, queerness, and the limits and potential of representation, often through a poetic/scholarly lineage that includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Saidiya Hartman, Anne Boyer, José Esteban Muñoz, Christina Sharpe, and Gwen Benaway, among others. This is the beautiful achievement of NDN Coping Mechanisms: Belcourt conjures a sovereign literary space that refuses white sovereignty and is always already in relation to the ideas of the foremost decolonial poets and thinkers of Turtle Island.
From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR BILLY-RAY BELCOURT AND THIS WOUND IS A WORLDWinner, Griffin Poetry PrizeWinner, Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book PrizeFinalist, Governor General’s Literary Award for PoetryFinalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardFinalist, Raymond Souster Award“Blending the resources of love song and elegy, prayer and manifesto, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World shows us poetry at its most intimate and politically necessary. Mindful of tangled lineages and the lingering erasures of settler colonialism, Belcourt crafts poems in which ‘history lays itself bare’ — but only as bare as their speaker’s shapeshifting heart. Belcourt pursues original forms with which to chart the constellations of queerness and indigeneity, rebellion and survival, desire and embodiedness these poems so fearlessly explore. Between its bold treatment of sexuality and wary anatomy of despair, This Wound is a World peels back the layers of feeling and experience to offer, finally, the glimmerings of hope — which only sometimes looks like escape: ‘follow me out the backdoor of the world.’ This electrifying book reminds us that a poem may live twin lives as incantation and inscription, singing from the untamed margins: ‘grieve is the name i give to myself / i carve it into the bed frame. / i am make-believe. / this is an archive. / it hurts to be a story.’” — 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize Judges’ Citation“This Wound is a World is a decolonial wild fire from which the acclaimed writer Billy-Ray Belcourt builds a new world — and it's the brilliant, radiant Indigenous world, I want to live in. His poetics create space out of nothing, unapologetically inhabit that space and then gift it to us with uninhibited love. Belcourt is sovereign genius and This Wound is a World redefines poetics as a refusal of colonial erasure, a radical celebration of Indigenous life and our beautiful, intimate rebellion. This is a breathtaking masterpiece. Belcourt has emerged fully formed.” — Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for CBC Books“Belcourt, in a cutting, contemporary idiom, has made himself the urgent fresh voice of his generation.” — Edmonton Journal“This is poetry at its brightest. It is electric, profound, necessary work. Belcourt bends genre, challenging the cage of colonialism through a poetics of intimacy. It is a collection unafraid to ask questions, exploring grief, desire, queer sexuality, and Indigeneity with tender honesty. Belcourt asks us to consider the ways Indigenous bodies can be simultaneously unbound and ‘rendered again,’ how worlds can be made and unmade. These are poems to be returned to again and again with reverence.” — Prism International“Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poems are full of sound. They are cacophonous enunciations of both the blaring and imperceptible legacies of colonization that resonate in contemporary life.” — CBC Arts
TC Tolbert
I believe I exist. / To live, one can be neither / more nor less hungry than that.’ How grateful I am that Billy-Ray Belcourt and these poems believe in themselves enough to exist. With prodigious clarity, this work moves swiftly amongst theory and prose, longing and lyric, questioning and coping, ‘not dying’ and ‘obsessively apologizing to the moon for all that she has to witness.’ It is not hyperbole to say these poems are brilliant. And so brilliantly, searingly, they live.
