A History of My Brief BodyA History of My Brief Body

A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize Billy-Ray Belcourt begins A History of My Brief Body with a letter to his nohkom, his grandmother. "In the world-to-come," he writes, "everyone is loved by an NDN woman like you whose soft voice reminds us that we can stop running now." What follows is a charting of the distance between the world he was born into and the world he wants--a book as beautiful as it is devastating. Reflecting on his personal history, Belcourt maps his "un-Canadian and otherworldly" desire to love at all costs. We're taken to his birthplace in Joussard, in northern Alberta, where he and his twin brother come to exemplify opposites: hard and soft, masculine and feminine. To his high school graduation, where a hug from his father teaches him how to hold and be held. To a hotel room in Edmonton, where destroying the photographic evidence of his adolescence is an act of self-abolition and of making himself anew. Blending memoir and essay, and with a poet's delight in language, A History of My Brief Body is both a grappling with a legacy of trauma and a record of the joy that flourishes in spite of it.