This Wound is a World slip-slides between poetry and essay to get at the shaky tempos of Indigenous life in a world bent on destroying it. It zeroes in on the world-shaking force of sex and love – when ‘we disappear into each other’ – to figure out how we are able to shoulder sadness like ours and still get through the day. Queer in form and content, This Wound is a World slows down the turbulent colonial present to scavenge for something of an exit route.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an MPhil in Politics (Political Theory) at the University of Oxford. He holds a BA (Hons.) in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta. He was named by CBC Books (à la Tracey Lindberg) as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, Decolonization, and mâmawi-âcimowak.