This Wound is a World
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs 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.”
- Winner, the Griffin Poetry Prize (2018)
- Winner, the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize (2018)
- Winner, Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer, Indigenous Voices Awards (2018)
- Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry (2018)
- Finalist, the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry (2018)
- Finalist, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2018)
- Finalist, the Raymond Souster Award (2018)
$19.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .163 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 9 × 6 × .3125 in |
| Page Count | 64 |
| Binding | Soft Cover with flaps |
| Year Published | 2017 |
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. candidate and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. In January 2020, he will be an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
In 2018, Billy-Ray was named by CBC Books as one of “14 Canadian poets to watch,” one of “18 emerging writers to watch,” and a “Writer to know.” That year, he was also named one of “ten young Canadians to watch” by the CBC.
“This book is a monument for the future of poetic possibility. It is rare to be able to call a book something so grand and full — and have it be utterly true. That’s what This Wound is a World affords us: myth and hyperbole pressed into a lived and realized life. A reckoning for and of the wreck — bravely buoyant, and finally here.”
~ Ocean Vuong.