Billy Ray Belcourt Books in Order

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poems explore Indigenous experiences of pain, sadness, love, and sexuality. Combining memoir and manifesto, the collection experiments with form while imagining a future beyond colonial violence and the constraints imposed on queer Indigenous lives.

Through poetry, photography, and redaction, Billy-Ray Belcourt examines the colonial violence embedded in everyday life. The collection considers queer identity, representations of Indigenous suffering, love, and the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a tool for liberation.

Belcourt draws on childhood memories, family relationships, and intimate experiences to explore grief, colonial violence, and queer identity. These essays and vignettes consider writing as survival while seeking possibilities for joy and a different future.

An Indigenous doctoral student leaves his dissertation behind and returns to his northern Alberta hometown to write a novel. Conversations with relatives and community members reveal intertwined stories of queerness, colonial violence, survival, and belonging.

Stories follow Indigenous people navigating grief, desire, family, and freedom, including a recently released prisoner and a professor returning home. Belcourt explores how intimate encounters and philosophical questions shape lives resisting the pressure of colonial conquest.

Poems, sonnets, fragments, and field notes examine queer Indigenous life amid the continuing effects of colonial history. Belcourt brings love, grief, humor, and resistance together while imagining possibilities for a future beyond inherited violence.