“These poems slip between forms, between ache and awe, between theory and touch. The book is an homage to and a field guide for a queer Indigenous past, present, and future. Just when I needed something to survive the world now, Belcourt offers us a vision where life might be something tender, magic, and deeply radiant.” –Jake Skeets (Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers)

Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.

In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes slyly humorous, are always finely crafted, putting 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 grief and awe.

Bringing together voices from across Turtle Island, a groundbreaking collection of letters from Indigenous writers, activists, and thinkers—to their ancestors, to future generations, and to themselves.

Drawing on the wisdom and personal experience of its esteemed contributors, this first-of-its-kind anthology tackles complex questions of our times to provide a rich tapestry of Indigenous life, past, present, and future. The letters explore the histories that have brought us to this moment, the challenges and crises faced by present-day communities, and the visions that will lead us to a new architecture for thinking about Indigeneity. Taking its structure from the medicine bundle—tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass—it will stir and empower readers, as well as enrich an essential and ongoing conversation about what reconciliation looks like and what it means to be Indigenous today.

“Belcourt is one of the finest and most sublime writers at work today. This book is a feat of beauty and compression, every sentence reinventing the reader.” —Claudia Dey (Daughter)

A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds.

Across the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reserves 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.