This Wound is a World

art 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.”

Billy-Ray Belcourt is the first Indigenous person in Canada to receive a Rhodes Scholarship, and has been named as one of six Indigenous writers to watch by CBC Books. He is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.