A History of My Brief Body
by Billy-Ray Belcourt

A dazzling collection of personal essays from internationally acclaimed First Nations Canadian writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, who mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.

A$24.99

(Trade paperback)

Available. Dispatched 2-3 business days

Overview

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.

Details

Reviews

ebook

Omar Sakr

‘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.’

Evelyn Araluen

‘Billy-Ray Belcourt is one of the most exciting international voices in literature today—young, tender and unrelenting. A History of My Brief Body is an excellent compilation of some of Billy's most powerful and provocative writing. He truly is among the best writers of our generation.’

Kirkus

‘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.’

Sheila Heti

Author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?

‘A History of My Brief Body puts the reader at the centre of a deeply serious struggle—with language, with sexuality, with race and colonial Canada, and with love and joy and a life in art. It’s about the attempt to stand in a centre one has created, all while feeling the impossibility of ever doing so, and also wondering if one maybe shouldn’t. This is a passionate and vital autobiography about the intellect, the culture, and the flesh, as it bears its assaults and preserves a true light.’

Elissa Washuta

Author of My Body Is a Book of Rules

‘Settler colonialism demands we believe we’d be better off without our bodies—their needs, their feelings, their raucous disobedience and ungovernable change. I don’t always know how to talk back to the violent nonsense that says, Disappear. With precision and care, Billy-Ray Belcourt presses thought against feeling to make, in each essay, an unbounded space for knowing and for staying whole.’

Heather O’Neill

Author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel

‘Billy-Ray Belcourt is proving himself to be a literary genius. His poetry and prose are tender and brutal and brilliant. This memoir recounts the intimate and sexual history of a young Indigenous poet who studies the reserve and the city. As with the writing of Maggie Nelson, I was astounded at both Belcourt’s scholarship and his acute reflections on the human condition. The book also provides indispensable insight into the political consciousness of Indigenous peoples in Canada.’

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His bestselling memoir,A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.