NDN COPING MECHANISMS: Notes from the Field by Billy-Ray Belcourt is publishing today with House of Anansi Press!
“For all the ferocious energy and one-two punch of language here, this is also a concentrated, beautifully managed work. Not just a poet to watch but one to read now, especially for readers interested in social justice issues—and for those who should know more.” — Library Journal (starred review)
From the publisher:
“Billy-Ray Belcourt […] aims an anthropological eye at the contours of NDN and queer social worlds to spot much that is left unsaid when we look only to the mainstream media. In this genre-bending work, Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibilities bubbling up everywhere NDNs are. [… NDN COPING MECHANISMS] 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 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 was named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. 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.