This Wound is a World

✍ Scribed by Billy-Ray Belcourt

• Publisher: Frontenac House Ltd.
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 72
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky to world inside." Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay."

✦ Table of Contents

This Wound Is a World
Winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Contents
Preface
THIS WOUND IS A WORLD
Love and Heartbreak Are Fuck Buddies
The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine Is Weesageechak
Gay Incantations
Notes from a Public Washroom
There Is a Dirt Road in Me
Wihtikowak Means “Men Who Can’t Survive Love”
The Rez Sisters II
Six Theses on Why Native People Die
Sacred
A History of the Present
We Were Never Meant to Break Like This
I Am Hoping to Help This City Heal from Its Trauma
Heartbreak Is a White Kid
If I Have a Body, Let It Be a Book of Sad Poems
Grief after Grief after Grief after Grief
The Creator Is Trans
The Back Alley of the World
Native Too
Colonialism: A Love Story
God’s River
Love and Other Experiments
OkCupid
Towards a Theory of Decolonization
An Elegy for Flesh
Everyone Is Lonely
There Is No Beautiful Left
Boyfriend Poems
God Must Be an Indian
Sexual History
Time contra Time
Something Like Love
Ode to Northern Alberta
The Oxford Journal
If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would be Falling Apart
The Rubble of Heartbreak
Wapekeka
Ode to Native Men
To Speak of the Dead, I Must Begin with the Photon
Hermeneutics of the Sometimes/Somewhere
Love Is a Moontime Teaching
Epilogue
Notes to the Poems
References
Acknowledgments
Author Biography