Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

NDN COPING MECHANISMS

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Notes From the Field

The follow-up collection from Griffin Poetry Prize - winning poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field is a provocative, powerful, and genre-bending new work. Part One examines the rhythms of everyday life, which include the terrible beauty of the reserve, the afterlives of history, and the grammar of anal sex. Part Two experiments with form and practice, putting to use, for example, a mode of documentary poetics that unearths the logics that make and unmake texts like Treaty 8.

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field emerges out of a form of auto/ethnographic sensibility that is at turns campy and playful, jarring and candid, displaying, once again, the writer's extraordinary craft, guile, audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut book of poems, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and was named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. It was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award. It was named by CBC Books as one of the best Canadian poetry collections of the year. Billy-Ray is a Ph.D. student and a 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds a Master's degree in Women's Studies from Wadham College at the University of Oxford.

Available products
Book Published 2019-09-01 by House of Anansi Press

Comments

NDN Coping Mechanisms is a haunting book that dreams a new world - a holy place filled with NDN girls, hair wet with utopia' - as it simultaneously excoriates the world that is a wound' and the historic and present modalities of violence against Indigenous peoples under Canadian settler colonialism. Belcourt considers the genocidal nation-state, queerness, and the limits and potential of representation, often through a poetic/scholarly lineage that includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Saidiya Hartman, Anne Boyer, José Esteban Muñoz, Christina Sharpe, and Gwen Benaway, among others. This is the beautiful achievement of NDN Coping Mechanisms: Belcourt conjures a sovereign literary space that refuses white sovereignty and is always already in relation to the ideas of the foremost decolonial poets and thinkers of Turtle Island. -- ercedes Eng, author of Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

For all the ferocious energy and one-two punch of language here, this is also a concentrated, beautifully managed work. -- Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

A masterful blend of the personal and the political, the ephemeral and the corporal, the theoretical and the emotional. -- Quill & Quire

I believe I exist. / To live, one can be neither / more nor less hungry than that.' How grateful I am that Billy-Ray Belcourt and these poems believe in themselves enough to exist. With prodigious clarity, this work moves swiftly amongst theory and prose, longing and lyric, questioning and coping, not dying' and obsessively apologizing to the moon for all that she has to witness.' It is not hyperbole to say these poems are brilliant. And so brilliantly, searingly, they live. --- TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania

This brilliant book is endlessly giving, lingering in tight spaces within the forms of loneliness, showing us their contours. These poems do the necessary work of negotiating with the heart-killing present from which we imagine and make Indigenous futures. Every line feels like a possible way out of despair. -- Elissa Washuta, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules