Book
A history of my brief body
Publication Information
Columbus, Ohio : Two Dollar Radio, [2020]
Physical Description
140 pages ; 20 cm
Summary
"Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us."--Amazon.
Notes
"An earlier version of 'Fatal Naming Rituals' was published in Hazlitt in 2018. 'Notes from an Archive of Injuries' was published in the Winter 2020 issue of Prairie Fire."--Title page verso.
Contents
- Preface: a letter to Nôhkom
- Introduction: A short theoretical note
- An NDN boyhood
- A history of my brief body
- Futuromania
- Gay: 8 scenes
- Loneliness in the age of Grindr
- Fragments from a half-existence
- An alphabet of longing
- Robert
- Notes from an archive of injuries
- Please keep loving: reflections on unlivability
- Fatal naming rituals
- To hang our grief up to dry.