This Wound is a World - Billy-Ray Belcourt (Frontenac House Poetry)

Today's book of poetry:
This Wound is a World.  Billy-Ray Belcourt.  Frontenac House Poetry.  Calgary, Alberta.  2017.

Griffin Poetry Prize 2017
CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book
2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize Winner

Billy-Ray Belcourt's stunning This Wound is a World deserved every prize it won and more.  There might be other poets who hammered at these walls but there has yet to be one, as far as Today's book of poetry is concerned, who might actually bring them down.  Billy-Ray Belcourt is such a poet.

It doesn't matter what you think you know about being gay or straight, Indigenous or not, these poems are going to change some of your perceptions.  In Today's book of poetry world we know that only the very best poems can pull off this sort of magic, this sort of medicine.

Billy-Ray Belcourt pulls the rabbit out his hat like some sort of Trickster.  The reader just has to sit back and watch the show.

The Cree Word For a Body Like Mine

Is Weesageechak

the cree word for a body like mine is weesageechak, the old ones know

of this kind of shape-shifting: sometimes i sweat and sweat until my 

bones puddles on the carpet in my living room and i am like the water

that comes before new life.

i was born during a falling leaves moon; which is to say that i have

always been good at sacrifice. it is believed that women are most

powerful during their moontime and because of this do not take part

in ceremonies in order to let the body cleanse itself. there are

weesageechak days when gender is a magic trick i forgot how to 

perform and my groin floods and floods trying to cleanse itself like

the women and i too become toxic for men who have built cages out

of broken boys.

maybe if i surrendered myself to grandmother moon she would know

what to do with these pickaxe wounds. there is so much i need to tell

her about how my rivers and lakes are crowded and narrowing. how i

managed to piece together a sweat lodge out of mud and fish and

bacteria. she gives me the cree name weesageechak and translates it to

"sadness is a carcass his tears leave behind."

and the crows and flies who don't care about gender will one day

make away with my jet-black finger nails and scraggly armpit hairs.

they will lay tobacco at my grave and tell their crow and fly kin that i

was once a broad-shouldered trickster who long ago fell from the

moon wearing make-up and skinny jeans.

💫💫💫

Belcourt will be in a unique poetic position, everyone who reads poetry is going to be anxious to see what he does next.  Today's book of poetry is already convinced This Wound is a World is a Canadian classic, we will be looking at this marvel for a long time.

True, hard-nosed blood letting is a dangerous game to play.  But it is clear Belcourt has big shoulders.  In this case it means the poet has put it all up for grabs, Billy-Ray doesn't hesitate for one second, he is full in, all in.  Billy-Ray Belcourt is a straight up gunslinger poet with dead-eye aim.

And dear readers, there is so much happening in This Wound is a World that I simply won't be able to tell you.  For example, you all know how much Today's book of poetry loves "list" poems.  We are a sucker for them.  Billy-Ray Belcourt has several excellent, I repeat, excellent, list poems in This Wound is a World.  Today's book of poetry loves those list poems - but, but, but, this is a book brimming over with the necessary.

If I Have A Body, Let It Be a Book of Sad Poems

i keep listening to a song by tom odell called grow old with me, i am

hung up on the enormity of that kind of project, of asking someone

to architect a livable world with you, what a blessing and a curse!

i hooked up with a man who insisted he was 42, but i suspect he was

older given the soft and reckless way he met my body with his. it was

9pm and we were making small talk and he told me a story about

how a relationship of his had started and ended at the same ski resort

in france. recently, he returned to that resort, and was caught

unawares by a wave of memories about his ex-boyfriend. today,he

lives alone in a houseboat, unwilling to be beside himself with desire.

how could he have expected anything but what christina sharpe calls

"the past that is not past" to haunt him? maybe that is why he wanted

to sleep with me last night. maybe that is why i invited him over in

the first place. i should have said: i don't have it in me to transform you.

if i have a body, let it be a book of sad poems. i mean it. indigeneity

troubles the idea of "having" a body, so if i am somehow,

miraculously, bodied then my skin is a collage of meditations on love

and shattered selves.

ok yes, i have been reading a bit of psychoanalysis lately. forgive me.

i am desperate. desperate to figure out how someone like me is still

here.

if i know anything, it is that "here" is a trick of the light, that it is a

way of schematizing time and space that is not the only one available

to some of us. maybe i am not here in the objectivist sense. maybe i

am here in the way that a memory is here. now, ain't that fucking sad

and beautiful?

💫💫💫

Reading Billy-Ray Belcourt's This Wound is a World the first time is like watching/hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan's all consuming attack on Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" for the first time.  It is hard to take it all in, quite, because the artist is so far ahead of the curve that the reader has to lean into it.  But make no mistake, Belcourt is:

     "Standing next to a mountain"

and will

     "chop it down with the edge of my hand."

It's exciting to read and instantly rewarding poetry.  Milo, our head tech, said that he had to get copies of This Wound is a World into the hands of a few of his friends, pronto.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, asked:  "Do you think he knows what he's done?"

To which Today's book of poetry replied, "Damned right he knows!"

Wapekeka

in january 2017

two girls, 12, carried out a suicide pact

on the wapekeka first nation.

what is suicide

but the act of opening up

to the sky?

but wanting to live

more than once?

yesterday

a cloud fell onto me

and i never felt more at home.

sometimes i cry

in indian

and it sounds like

i am speaking

in english.

don't open your eyes.

pretend that

everything is a bird

and no one is hungry

for what they can't have.

...

Today's book of poetry is certain that poetry this necessary will find an audience.  This Wound is a World is going to be remembered as a landmark book.

Today's book of poetry is thrilled to back on the job and excited to be starting the year with Billy-Ray Belcourt's amazing and brave This Wound is a World.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Image from CBC Books

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford. Billy-Ray was named one of six Indigenous writers to watch by CBC Books in 2016, one of ten Indigenous writers to read right now by VICE in 2017, and he was the recipient of the 2017 P.K. Page Founder’s Award for Poetry. This Wound is a World is his first book.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

recites one of his poems

Video: Edmonton Journal

frontenachouse.com

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