During his Festival of Words panel with Alasdair Rees, another youth poet making waves in the Canadian scene, Billy-Ray Belcourt shared a selection of work from his two published collections, both of which explore identity in a very personal way.
Belcourt is the youngest winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and has written two books of haunting poetry that explore the fears and pleasure of identity, love, and queer sexuality.
He hails from the Driftpile Cree Nation, in Northern Alberta, and is a previous Rhodes Scholar working on his doctorate at the University of Alberta.
His work addresses the decolonial existence, exploring identity, love, queer sexuality, and Indigenous experience. His debut work, This Wound is a World was listed on the CBC’s top ten poetry collections of 2017.
Belcourt read from his collections, titled The Wound is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms, which attempt to “account for one’s suffering as it was unfolding,” and to return to those moments with a distance.
He also read an excerpt from a fiction work he is partway through, a collection of conversations with members of a rural community to explore their experience.
The panel featured both artists with a firm grasp on the present, and the ever-shifting concepts on identity in society and technology — complementing each other a representing the modern perspectives who are engaging in the poetic community.
