Welcome to Litsy!

I'm not sure how to talk about this book except to say it's a phenomenal collection of poetry. Reading Billy-Ray Belcourt feels like an enormous privilege. It's a collection where I had to stop myself from collecting every other line in my phone notes because it's all just so good. I love his play with language, his seamless shifts between tones, his irreverent humour, his powerful interrogation of colonialism, and, of course, the queerness.

"A white boyfriend of mine wanted me to be less beholden to the clouds. / I told him we are all at the mercy of the sky, for better or worse. / Part of me thinks he doesn't deserve to know / about this mode of attention, this art of description. / But I can't keep secrets. I am addicted / to the high of letting my own words forsake me."

"I make out with my imaginary NDN lover / on the ashes of every Canadian pastoral poem ever written."

I tried to read NDN COPING MECHANISMS the same way I read 99% of poetry collections: piecemeal, over a couple weeks.

I finished it in a night, because once I started I couldn‘t stop. I read and reread and relished each poem. I considered how Belcourt operates where the academic and the everyday meet; how he mines rage and hope from the same vein.

I wish this had made it into Canada Reads. It‘s brilliant and necessary. 5 stars.

This is a phenomenal poetry collection and a new favourite. Highly recommended.

Taking a little poetry break between clients #queerbooks

I wrote a poem to resemble a forest floor teeming with decaying vegetation.
A struggling thing isn‘t a struggling thing
if everything else is in a state of rot.
Nothing can be turned inside out if “inside” and “out”
are free-floating concepts in a world without direction.
No one wants to be a free-floating concept
unless emptiness is a harrowing feat.

A segment of Belcourt‘s blackout poem created from the contents of Treaty 8.

“In late 1823, Hugh Glass guides Andrew Henry‘s
trappers through unorganized territory.”
[…]
white people see what they want.
Had this been a movie made by NDNs
that bear would have killed
Leonardo DiCaprio in the first 10 minutes
& for the next 2 hours & 26 minutes
(because this movie runs 2 hours & 36 minutes)
there would have been no footage
just the sounds of NDNs
organizing territory.
Whatever the fuck that means!

My hobbies include:
not dying,
obsessively apologizing to the moon for all that she
has to witness,
and slow dancing to the tune of “Heaven” by Bryan
Adams with men
who will refuse to give in to the life-changing magic
of vulnerability.