“To read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes but also beyond them: horizon as ‘line break’, infrastructure as ‘wound,’ ‘an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.’ These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real-time, ‘in order to repair it.’ How this new form might arrive—‘miraculously’ but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that’s ongoing, ‘meandering’ but also (always) ‘incomplete’—becomes what happens when we read.”
—Bhanu Kapil
“This was beautiful. I am wowed, again. There were moments when I lost my breath. The Idea of an Entire Life engineers a lexicon for us to decipher what it means to be wedged between a staling futurism and the em dash of colonial chronicle. Where the body is a poem and the poetics of embodiment are found in grammatology: in the enjambment of a horizon ‘between me and my ancestors,’ here a semicolon proceeds finality in asking ‘what if when my life ends there is still more life,’ and the queer Indigenous rite that with a huffing comma we ‘continue living.’ Belcourt creates a blueprint, mapped on waxy, hard ground, the world the stylus etching out designs beneath: quotidian utopias, reverberant chambers, the portcullis of history, the choreography of a bedroom. And I, too, like Belcourt, peek from the margins and of his sonnet weave a wave.”
—Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land
“The Idea of an Entire Life reaches toward the edge of language and returns to us a map of becoming. These poems slip between forms, between ache and awe, between theory and touch. The book is an homage to and a field guide for a queer Indigenous past, present, and future. Just when I needed something to survive the world now, Belcourt offers us a vision where life might be something tender, magic, and deeply radiant.”
—Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
