This Wound Is a World

"This Wound Is a World is a decolonial wildfire from which the acclaimed writer Billy-Ray Belcourt builds a new world and its the brilliant, radiant, f*cked up Indigenous world I want to live in. . . . [His book] redefines poetics as a refusal of colonial erasure, a radical celebration of Indigenous life and our beautiful, intimate rebellion. This is a breathtaking masterpiece."Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and musician "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 fulland 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 wreckbravely buoyant, alive, and finally here."Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds "This Wound Is a World is a wonder. It is filled with humor, sadness, sadness about sadness, sex, profound and profane lyricism, and above all power. Billy-Ray Belcourts voice is uniquely plangent and self-aware. The book is a world with worlds inside it. It means to de-colonize any possible readers pre- or mis-conceptions about what it means to be alive and Indian today."Tommy Orange, author of There There "This luminous collections formal experimentation arises from an urgent need to address the complexity of learning how to love and be broken at the same time. As the title suggests, woundedness is a resource for forging avenues toward a yet unimagined future."Star Tribune "This collection is an answer to and a reckoning with story and with sadness itself: its ever-presence in the telling of the Indigenous body, the queer body, the body moving through stages of love and loss."American Poets "Belcourt makes good on the promise of his title through poetry in which sadness, grief, and death are seamlessly entwined with love, sex, and cruising both within and across racial lines."Native American and Indigenous Studies

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canadas first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. His second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, will be published in fall 2019.