A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance
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.
About the Series
Raised Voices is a poetry series established in 2021 to raise marginalized voices and perspectives, to publish poems that affirm progressive values and are accessible to a wide readership, and to celebrate poetry’s ability to access truth in a way that no other form can.
“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