Search:

A history of my brief body : a memoir / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Billy-Ray Belcourt begins A History of My Brief Body with a letter to his nohkom, his grandmother. "In the world-to-come," he writes, "everyone is loved by an NDN woman like you whose soft voice reminds us that we can stop running now." What follows is a charting of the distance between the world he was born into and the world he wants--a book as beautiful as it is devastating. Reflecting on his personal history, Belcourt maps his "un-Canadian and otherworldly" desire to love at all costs. We're taken to his birthplace in Joussard, in northern Alberta, where he and his twin brother come to exemplify opposites: hard and soft, masculine and feminine. To his high school graduation, where a hug from his father teaches him how to hold and be held. To a hotel room in Edmonton, where destroying the photographic evidence of his adolescence is an act of self-abolition and of making himself anew. Blending memoir and essay, and with a poet's delight in language, A History of My Brief Body is both a grappling with a legacy of trauma and a record of the joy that flourishes in spite of it."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Essays.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray; Gay men; Sexual minorities; Indigenous peoples; Poets, Canadian (English);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Coexistence : stories / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.Short stories.Selections.;
"A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from a Giller-longlisted author and one of contemporary literature's most boundless minds. Across the prairies and Canada's west coast, on reservations and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They're learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment. An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school -- a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal. Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt's mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers."--
Subjects: Short stories.; Indigenous peoples; Interpersonal relations; Loneliness; Love;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

A minor chorus : a novel / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.;
"An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada's most daring literary talents. An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness. What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score. Whether he's meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely. Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become--and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music."--
Subjects: Novels.; Authors; Families; Gay men; Homecoming; Indigenous peoples; Small cities; Storytelling; First Nations reserves;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
unAPI

Carving space : the Indigenous Voices Awards anthology / by Abel, Jordan,1985-editor.; Baker, Carleigh,editor.; Reddon, Madeleine,editor.;
Includes bibliographical references."To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Indigenous Voices Awards, an anthology consisting of selected works by finalists over the past five years, edited by Jordan Abel, Carleigh Baker, and Madeleine Reddon. For five years, the Indigenous Voices Awards have nurtured the work of Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada. Established in 2017 initially through a crowd-funded campaign by lawyer Robin Parker and author Silvia Moreno-Garcia that set an initial fundraising goal of $10,000, the initiative raised over $116,000 in just four months. Through generous support from organizations such as Penguin Random House Canada, CELA, and others, the award has grown and have helped usher in a new and dynamic generation of Indigenous writers. Past IVA recipients include Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, and Jesse Thistle. The IVAs also help promote the works of unpublished writers, helping launch the careers of Smokii Sumac, Cody Caetano, and Samantha Martin-Bird. For the first time, a selection of standout works over the past five years of the Indigenous Voices Award will be collected in an anthology that will highlight some of the most groundbreaking Indigenous writing across poetry, prose, and theatre in English, French, and in an Indigenous language. Curated by award-winning and critically acclaimed writers Carleigh Baker, Jordan Abel, and Indigenous scholar Madeleine Reddon, this anthology will be a true celebration of Indigenous storytelling that will both introduce readers to emerging luminaries as well as return them to treasured favourites"--
Subjects: Literature.; Indigenous literature;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI