This Wound Is a World

Billy Ray-Belcourt has delivered a stunning and powerful collection of poems. The poems are saturated with a sadness and self awareness about the affective condition of indigeneity that shook me to my core. Deep resonance with Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return. The introduction and epilogue are as moving as the poems and Belcourt doesn't shy away from the sadness of the work but instead insists that we might read sadness as itself a condition of possibility for a different, deeper kind of relationality beyond coloniality.

Love the poet’s way with words.

This Wound Is a World manages to pack queerness and the struggles of life in America as a Native American and a whole lot of heart in just 74 pages. It's pretty amazing, both in prose and in message.

A fantastic collection on queerness and indigeneity

I'd like to start with the fact that it's been so long since I've read a collection of poems that I wanted to savour and even as I got to the Epilogue (which I loved, dearly, because of the reference to Cvetkovich's essay that I studied in a class I was absolutely blown away by this semester), I knew it would the first of many times I'd read it.The poems were varying in their forms and styles and the content matched the poetic line of its page and there was a natural cadence to each as I'd read them under my breath because poetry is meant to live off the page and sit happily on our lips, in our bodies, in our hearts – that's why I love it so much, it's more than just the words, it's the feelings they evoke and I swear nothing carries emotion better than good poetry. But this is great poetry, and it reached into me and drew feelings I thought I'd stopped feelings and made room for new ones.I've been meaning to read this collection of poems for so long that I was a little afraid of how much of an impact it would have on me when I finally did. I'm a firm believer in the idea that there is a time and place for each work of literature one consumes and I can strongly say that this was the right book at the right moment.This book is probably means (and is going to mean) so many different things to the audience that reaches and that's the beauty of it. The author explores his identity and doesn't alienate in the process, it's a journey of self-discovery and reflection invites the reader to do some inner work. These poems don't claim to heal, but they can definitely lead the way to a hopeful start.

This is not just a book, but many pieces of soul waved like a dreamcatcher's web and truthfully shared without dulling, diluting or exaggerating any colour, any shade of truth. YOU MUST READ IT: you'll feel those poems deep in your bones days after reading them.

bought as a gift because of the nature of the book, written by a Indigenous young man who has accomplished so much is so little time

it was good

Glad to finally have a copy, love this poet.