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 loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; 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.