NDN COPING MECHANISMS: NOTES FROM THE FIELD
“In his second collection…big-breaking Canadian poet Belcourt seems nearly to fling his startling and broken-glass-sharp phrases on the page. But for all the ferocious energy and one-two punch of language here, this is also a concentrated, beautifully managed work.”
Library Journal, starred review
OVERVIEW
CBC BOOKS’ TOP CANADIAN POETRY BOOK OF 2019
A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2019
A WRITERS’ TRUST OF CANADA BEST BOOK OF 2019
In the follow-up to his Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt writes using the modes of accusation and interrogation. He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples’ rogue possibility, their utopian drive.
AWARDS
WINNER, 2020 STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST, 2O2O LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY POETRY
SHORTLIST, 2020 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
SHORTLIST, 2020 ROBERT KROETSCH CITY OF EDMONTON BOOK PRIZE
LONGLIST, CBC’S CANADA READS 2020
SHORTLIST, 2020 RELIT AWARD
PURCHASE ONLINE
REVIEWS
Library Journal, starred review
INTERVIEWS
Open Book: “Intimacy was a lost country.”