Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body

Advance praise for
A History of My Brief Body

In A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray breaks apart the reflection of a life into the specificity of momentsboth his own and our collective experienceand beads them into his simultaneously sharp and lush writing. Bursting with all the movements of sex, riot, and repose, this book presents us with a shock of recognition and reclamation, and we are better for itpunch drunk and aching but, oh, so much better. Im gutted by his brilliant mind.

Cherie Dimaline, bestselling author of Empire of Wild and The Marrow Thieves

A History of My Brief Body puts the reader at the centre of a deeply serious strugglewith language, with sexuality, with race and colonial Canada, and with love and joy and a life in art. Its 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 shouldnt. 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.

Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?

A History of My Brief Body is an NDN love story that will stop you in your tracks. Im struck by the gentleness in Belcourts words, his ability to move across scales, and the complexity of his thought. Hes achieved something here that weve collectively been trying to achieve for a long time, and it makes me feel proud.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of This Accident of Being Lost

I choose not to reduce A History of My Brief Body to simply a bending of genre. Well beyond that simple idea, Billy-Ray Belcourt uses a dexterity of language and form as a container for memory and nostalgia as vehicles for truth about a still-blooming present. I love a book where a writer treats themselves and their own histories with gentleness and care, and this book is a towering achievement on that front.

Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Cant Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Settler colonialism demands we believe wed be better off without our bodiestheir needs, their feelings, their raucous disobedience and ungovernable change. I dont 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.

Elissa Washuta, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules

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 Belcourts scholarship and his acute reflections on the human condition. The book also provides indispensable insight into the political consciousness of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Heather ONeill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel

A History of My Brief Body is irrevocably timely and erupting with such political immediacy that one ought to pull apart the very title and sit within its kneading cogs. How beautifully damning is it to be seen on such a balanced scaling. For language to be put in the absence of that which is continually wrenched from our hands is an exquisite gifting indeed. Belcourt asks us to be prepared to be devastated by this work, for which I am: I march hand-in-hand with his narrator towards obliteration with such a gaiety that I find unbridled joy even in the midst of such apocalyptic ponderings. A History of My Brief Body is Belcourt at his finest!

Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

Belcourt is one of the great voices for our generation, speaking both to his elders and generations to come in this urgent and searching work. While reading A History of My Brief Body, I was reminded of Jos Esteban Muozs vision of queerness as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality that we are forever approaching but never reach. A state of perpetual becoming. Belcourt has his eyes set on that horizon. The journey is not yet complete. It will never be complete. But I am grateful to have a text like this to mark our path along the journey, and to help guide us forward that much further.

Jordan Tannahill, author of Liminal

Also by Billy-Ray Belcourt

This Wound Is a World
NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada USA UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

First published 2020

Copyright 2020 by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Some sections of this book were previously excerpted or published as essays in the following journals: Fatal Naming Rituals in Hazlitt, Notes from an Archive of Injuries in Prairie Fire, and the passage on in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: A history of my brief body / Billy-Ray Belcourt.

Names: Belcourt, Billy-Ray, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190139773 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190139781 |

ISBN 9780735237780 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735237797 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: Belcourt, Billy-Ray. | LCSH: Belcourt, Billy-RayChildhood and youth. | LCSH: Indigenous peoplesCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Sexual minoritiesCanadaBiography. | CSH: Poets, Canadian (English)21st centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC PS8603.E516 Z46 2020 | DDC C811/.6dc23

Cover and interior design: Kelly Hill

Cover art: Maggie Groat, Of Another Natural History I, 2011

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To those for whom utopia is a rallying call

Failure to hear will matter to those who do not listen and those who are not heard, not only because stories without an audience do not survive but also because being heard or ignored impacts how the past resonates in the present.

JILL STAUFFER , Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live.

MAGGIE NELSON , Bluets

AUTHORS NOTE

If I were to rank my aesthetic concerns, ambiguity would come before veracity. As such, some names and identifying features have been altered. My story isnt linear, and in these pages I marshal the forces of poetry and theory to create a kind of memoir that stretches well beyond the boundaries of my individual life.

Contents