Review; This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to recieve a press copy of the poetry collection This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt through Netgalley. I read it shortly afterwards and today I'll post my review.

Description from Goodreads
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the U.S.

“i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial “norms.”

My Thoughts on the Book
The Wound Is a World is a heartwrenching and moving poetry collection. Another thing I really appreciated was that it's queer indigenous poetry and I hope that it could pave the way fore more.

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