Description
Book SynopsisIn his follow-up to This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt's Griffin Poetry Prizewinning collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field is a provocative, powerful, and genre-bending new work that uses the modes of accusation and interrogation.
He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples' rogue possibility, their utopian drive.
In NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, the poet takes on the political demands of queerness, mainstream portrayals of Indigenous life, love and its discontents, and the limits and uses of poetry as a vehicle for Indigenous liberation. In the process,
Trade Review
For all the ferocious energy and one-two punch of language here, this is also a concentrated, beautifully managed work. * Library Journal *
Both intellectual and visceral, these poems dazzle with metaphoric richness and striking lyricism. * Toronto Star *
A masterful blend of the personal and the political, the ephemeral and the corporeal, the theoretical and the emotional. * Quill and Quire *
An impressive follow-up to his first book. * Winnipeg Free Press *
Playful, candid, and campy. * Prairie Books NOW *
