What good is poetry in a time of despair?
For Billy-Ray Belcourt, a poem draws its power from its use of language — of imagery and metaphors that are not indebted to the present in the same way as everyday speech.
Poetic language, he says, has the unique capacity “to unmoor us from calcified ways of thinking and doing.” Used correctly, it becomes a vehicle for imagining new political possibilities.
“I write poems to remind myself I am in love with a freedom I haven’t yet experienced,” Belcourt declares in The Idea of An Entire Life, his first collection of poetry in over half a decade.
Arriving at a moment of escalating environmental and political crises — including a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, attacks on migrants and trans people in America and the rise of an “elbows up” nationalism that threatens to steamroll Indigenous rights — The Idea of An Entire Life doubles as a bulwark against despair; or perhaps an exit route from the ruins of colonial capitalism.
I caught up with Belcourt over Zoom from his home in Vancouver, where he teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Though he speaks of his craft with a professorial sense of authority, his youthful appearance and the occasional nervous giggle betray the fact that he’s still, remarkably, just 30 years old.
Born in Driftpile Cree Nation — a tiny, Treaty 8 reserve tucked on the southern shore of the Lesser Slave Lake in northern Alberta — Belcourt was raised by his grandparents in a single-income home. After high school, he moved to Edmonton to study at the University of Alberta, where he became the first Indigenous person in Canada to receive a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.
Over the next several years, he published two collections of poetry, a memoir and two works of fiction, cementing his role as one of the most exciting and provocative young literary talents to emerge from Canada. His 2017 debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, made him the youngest-ever recipient of the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“When I travel internationally to promote my own work, I most often get asked if I know Billy-Ray Belcourt,” says Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician.
“The question is often from a reader who hangs out until the very end of the book signing line and they quietly explain to me how Belcourt has changed their life or saved their life, and how they felt seen in his work.”
Less than 60 pages in length, The Idea of An Entire Life is an absorbing and unconventional collection, one that moves between lyric verse and sonnets and that explores Belcourt’s familiar themes of queer love and anguish; of the paradox of existing in a present “as beautiful as it is brutal.”
It’s a book that attempts to capture the Indigenous experience of existing in the “afterlife of history” — in the ruins left by a state-led genocide and amid ongoing colonial practices that steal Indigenous Peoples’ land, destroy their languages and subvert their modes of relating to one another.
“We are all subjects of the twentieth century,” he declares in the opening poem.
Throughout, Belcourt inserts archival documents and field notes from the 1900s between poems, reflecting the fragmented history of his community. In one poem, he writes of Alberta’s reserve system in the mid-1930s: “When you live in an open-air prison, even the rain feels like a slap from God.”
A century later, Canada remains tethered to that past, Belcourt says. Efforts to control Indigenous populations and dispossess them of their land have not disappeared but simply evolved.
Early colonialism, he explains, took the form of necropolitics — or “a politics of death” — in which the Canadian state used violence and starvation to subdue Indigenous Peoples.
By the mid-20th century, the state shifted into a phase of biopolitics, which involved controlling the bodies and health of its colonized subjects. Canada introduced a system of residential schools and government-led social services that stripped Indigenous nations of sovereignty over their health and education, while deepening inequities between Indigenous and settler populations.
In recent decades, Canada has shifted into a new phase Belcourt describes as a “politics of emotion,” in which the state initiated a public reckoning with its colonial history without halting the colonial practices of the present.
Launched in 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) worked to document the systemic abuses that took place under the residential school system. The problem with this project, Belcourt says, is that it positioned Indigenous people as the objects of repair, rather than the state.
“Reconciliation prompted us to relinquish negative feelings over the past, but many, including myself, were not willing to do that. Because we have not severed from the past. The past endures.”
Indeed, 10 years after the TRC released its 94 calls to actions — “false promises,” as Belcourt describes them — barely a dozen have been fulfilled. In June, the Liberal government passed Bill C-5, a brazen piece of legislation that empowers the state to fast-track infrastructure projects without Indigenous consent.
It’s against this backdrop, Belcourt argues, that poetry becomes a means to overwrite state-sanctioned language and challenge colonial political projects.
“The mantra of ‘another world is possible,’ which has been so important to liberatory politics, is always present when I think of what a poem can do,” Belcourt says. “It not only reminds us that another world is possible — it can insist on that other world.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Oct/Nov issue.