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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2019
form: poetry
dates read: 25.5.24-26.5.24
only five years late I finally read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, his second poetry collection. overall I think it’s good, but I also don’t think it’s as good as his first collection, This Wound Is a World — or, at least, I didn’t like it as much.
a lot of this is, frankly and regretfully, because it’s less confessional — not that it needs to be confessional, but rather because instead it’s taken an even deeper dive into poststructuralism. (the narrator of his novel, A Minor Chorus, says: “I wanted to write like every queer theorist I read”; yeah, I noticed.) this style of writing can sometimes be affectively quite moving (though I’m a bit dubious about its political efficacy), but here it often feels to me more like an evasion of affect, or a retreat into the extremely high register of theory, in a way that just didn’t work for me in the form of verse poems.
however!
while this is the dominant mode / register in the collection, it’s not the only one. I think the highlight for me as a poem was probably “Treaty 8”, a long erasure poem using the text of the titular treaty, which is presented as several pages of largely blacked-out text with a scattering of legible words and phrases. the poem itself is very good, and the visual effect is also extremely cool in a way I’m having trouble articulating; visually disorienting, almost. the other highlight was the selection of, perhaps, essay-poems, like “Canadian Horror Story”, “Melancholy’s Forms”, and “Red Utopia” — I really liked these, way more than the verse poems and more even than some of my favorite poems from This Wound Is a World, which makes me think I will probably enjoy A History of My Brief Body, which I’m moving up my list.
moods: reflective