History of My Brief Body

142 pages

English language

Published Nov. 10, 2020 by Two Dollar Radio.

ISBN:
978-1-937512-93-4
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4 stars (1 review)

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.

For 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.

Billy-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. 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 …

6 editions

Beautifully Written, Requires Close Reading

4 stars

What struck me most was that I had to read this in a different way than I ordinarily read. Ordinarily reading for me is relaxing, flowing and almost dissociative, here I felt like I had to engage my full attention and engage carefully with each sentence. I had to go slow, frequently re-read, and look up concepts, as if I were back in college.

I read this way because the sentences were very dense. Belcourt is a poet who writes like a poet, and he shows an admirable trust in his readers to pick up oblique, multilayered concepts without a lot of hand-holding. I'm not sure what it means that the book was most direct when talking about sex. The most difficult part to me was teasing out what was uniquely NDN and what was just the general human experience.

The major theme was joy and utopia as a reaction …