Idea of an Entire Life: Poems
Idea of an Entire Life: Poems
Idea of an Entire Life: Poems
Description
Description
Named a Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2025 by CBC Books Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt. In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes slyly humorous, are always finely crafted, putting to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt's body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of grief and awe.
About the Author
About the Author
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of 6 books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning debut This Wound Is a World. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nîkân, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Native Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Belcourt (A Minor Chorus, 2022) dives into Indigenous identity by excavating language, land, history, and the human body in deft, direct lyrics."
--Booklist "Beautiful. I am wowed, again. There were moments when I lost my breath. The Idea of an Entire Life engineers a lexicon for us to decipher what it means to be wedged between a staling futurism and the em dash of colonial chronicle."
--Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land "To read The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as 'line break, ' infrastructure as 'wound, ' 'an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.' Belcourt writes what's already broken, breaking in real time, 'in order to repair it.'"
--Bhanu Kapil "The Idea of an Entire Life reaches toward the edge of language and returns to us a map of becoming. These poems slip between forms, between ache and awe, between theory and touch. The book is an homage to and a field guide for a queer Indigenous past, present, and future. Just when I needed something to survive the world now, Belcourt offers us a vision where life might be something tender, magic, and deeply radiant."
--Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
--Booklist "Beautiful. I am wowed, again. There were moments when I lost my breath. The Idea of an Entire Life engineers a lexicon for us to decipher what it means to be wedged between a staling futurism and the em dash of colonial chronicle."
--Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land "To read The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as 'line break, ' infrastructure as 'wound, ' 'an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.' Belcourt writes what's already broken, breaking in real time, 'in order to repair it.'"
--Bhanu Kapil "The Idea of an Entire Life reaches toward the edge of language and returns to us a map of becoming. These poems slip between forms, between ache and awe, between theory and touch. The book is an homage to and a field guide for a queer Indigenous past, present, and future. Just when I needed something to survive the world now, Belcourt offers us a vision where life might be something tender, magic, and deeply radiant."
--Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Beacon Press
Pub date:
2025-09-09
Length:
80 pages
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