This Wound is a World

Now part of the groundbreaking Kanata Classics list, with a new introduction, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Griffin Prize winning poetry debut catapulted him into a beloved voice of his generation.

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize • Winner of the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize • Winner of the Indigenous Voices Award for Most Significant Work of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.” Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs 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.”