Common Reads Library Marketing
0 0
Download high-resolution image

The Idea of an Entire Life

Poems

Author Billy-Ray Belcourt
Ebook (EPUB)
Beacon Press
On sale Sep 09, 2025 | 80 Pages | 9780807022412
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
View on Edelweiss
From award-winning Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, a dazzling exploration of love, anguish, queerness, and Indigenous resistance in the 21st century

Queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide. Rigorous in research and thought yet accessible in language and imagery, this collection weaves lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine the delicate facets of queer Indigeneity.

Belcourt contends with the afterlife of what he calls “the long twentieth century,” a period marked by assaults on Indigenous life, and his people’s enduring resistance. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, are marked by the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.

His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history—and yet pulled toward a more flourishing future.
“Native Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Belcourt (A Minor Chorus, 2022) dives into Indigenous identity by excavating language, land, history, and the human body in deft, direct lyrics.”
—Booklist

“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.”
—Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land

“To read 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.’ Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real time, ‘in order to repair it.’”
—Bhanu Kapil

“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
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of 6 books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning debut This Wound Is a World. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nîkân, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
Billy-Ray Belcourt View titles by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Autofiction
Utopia
20th-Century Cree History
Endnotes
An Entire Life
The Past Tense
Fieldnotes
Childhood Triptych
The Closet
Future Thinking
The Cruising Utopia Sonnets
Preludes
Fieldnotes
A Prayer
Form
Subjugated Knowledge
Autofiction
Fieldnotes
Perspective
Sincerity
Realism
Sentimentality
The Problem with Pleasure
Fieldnotes
20th-Century Cree History
Endnotes
Subarctica

Notes
Acknowledgments

About

From award-winning Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, a dazzling exploration of love, anguish, queerness, and Indigenous resistance in the 21st century

Queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide. Rigorous in research and thought yet accessible in language and imagery, this collection weaves lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine the delicate facets of queer Indigeneity.

Belcourt contends with the afterlife of what he calls “the long twentieth century,” a period marked by assaults on Indigenous life, and his people’s enduring resistance. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, are marked by the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.

His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history—and yet pulled toward a more flourishing future.

Reviews

“Native Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Belcourt (A Minor Chorus, 2022) dives into Indigenous identity by excavating language, land, history, and the human body in deft, direct lyrics.”
—Booklist

“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.”
—Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land

“To read 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.’ Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real time, ‘in order to repair it.’”
—Bhanu Kapil

“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

Author

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of 6 books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning debut This Wound Is a World. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nîkân, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
Billy-Ray Belcourt View titles by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Table of Contents

Autofiction
Utopia
20th-Century Cree History
Endnotes
An Entire Life
The Past Tense
Fieldnotes
Childhood Triptych
The Closet
Future Thinking
The Cruising Utopia Sonnets
Preludes
Fieldnotes
A Prayer
Form
Subjugated Knowledge
Autofiction
Fieldnotes
Perspective
Sincerity
Realism
Sentimentality
The Problem with Pleasure
Fieldnotes
20th-Century Cree History
Endnotes
Subarctica

Notes
Acknowledgments

Additional formats

Other books in this series

Penguin Random House Library Marketing

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)
    • More Websites from
      Penguin Random House
    • Common Reads
    • Library Marketing