The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems

A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance

In The Idea of an Entire Life, 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.

Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. He contends with the afterlife of he calls "the long twentieth century," a century marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples’ enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, put to use 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 pulled toward a more flourishing future.