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.Įye-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.Įvelyn Araluen, author of Dropbear, interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt (May 5, 2021/hosted by UQP, indie publisher in Australia) What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it first loves and first loves lost sexual exploration and intimacy the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.įor readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.īilly-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance.'

'In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. * A Best Book of 2020 - Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy, Maudlin House

* 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, Finalist.

Please note that this book can only be mailed to US addresses.

A History of Violence by Mallory Fox