Coexistence
Stories
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
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.
An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.
Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scintillating collection from Indigenous Canadian author Belcourt (A Minor Chorus), queer Cree men grapple with the legacy of colonialism. "Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century can mean that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness," says the narrator of "Lived Experience." Such conflicting emotions play into his ambivalence about sex, but after swearing off encounters with other men, he falls for a painter named Will, and shows up at Will's art gallery opening wearing a denim jacket emblazoned with the phrase "GAY 4 PAY JK ABOLISH WORK." Amorous and economic concerns also overlap in "Poetry Class," about a poet who believes in the "revolutionary demand" of his craft, while his ex was obsessed with satisfying the market. In the gritty and moving "Outside," a restless young man named Jack beats a drug trafficking charge, returns from jail to his grandmother's trailer on the reservation, and matches on Tinder with a neighbor named Lucy. Throughout, Belcourt sheds light on the transformative potential of love, describing, for instance, how Jack is changed by Lucy when she invites him into her life, which "open space inside his mind for different memories" and drives him to "give over to new pasts, future emotional histories." These wise and open-hearted stories astonish.
