A History of My Brief Body
$18.75 $25.00| ISBN-13: | 9780735237780 | Format: | Hardcover |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subject: | Hard Cover Non-Fiction | Publisher: | Penguin Canada |
| Published: | May 19th 2020 | Pages: | 192 |
Book Description
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
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. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and 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.
About the Author
BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a poet, author, and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Belcourt is a recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, the highest honour the Indigenous community bestows on its leaders. He is currently working on his PhD at the University of Alberta and will join UBC's Creative Writing Program as an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Creative Writing in January 2020.