Skip content
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch
This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

This Wound Is a World

$13.46

Retail price: $14.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Length 1 hour 5 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. He is also the author of NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. This Wound Is a World was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. He is also the author of NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field.

Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of local bookstores with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Reviews

This Wound Is a World is a decolonial wildfire from which the acclaimed writer Billy-Ray Belcourt builds a new world, and it’s the brilliant, radiant, fucked-up Indigenous world I want to live in. His book redefines poetics as a refusal of colonial erasure, a radical celebration of Indigenous life, and our beautiful, intimate rebellion. This is a breathtaking masterpiece.”

“Redefines poetics as a refusal of colonial erasure, a radical celebration of Indigenous life, and our beautiful, intimate rebellion. This is a breathtaking masterpiece.”

“Narrating with a blend of steadiness and emotion, he delivers this memoir-manifesto-meditation in a voice uniquely his…A must-listen for anyone who lives in the colonial world, and accessible to listeners of all genres. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

“Filled with humor, sadness, sadness about sadness, sex, profound and profane lyricism, and, above all, power. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s voice is uniquely plangent and self-aware.”

“This book is a monument for the future of poetic possibility. It is rare to be able to call a book something so grand and full—and have it be utterly true.”

Expand reviews
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch