The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance

In The Idea of an Entire Life, queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide.

Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. He contends with the afterlife of he calls "the long twentieth century," a century marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples’ enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, put to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.

His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history and pulled toward a more flourishing future.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Indigenous, Canada

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2025

About the author

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His books are: THIS WOUND IS A WORLD (Frontenac House 2017; UMinn Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, NDN COPING MECHANISMS (House of Anansi 2019), winner of the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Prize and longlisted for Canada Reads, A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY (Hamish Hamilton and Two Dollar Radio 2020), finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, and the forthcoming A MINOR CHORUS: A NOVEL (Hamish Hamilton and Norton 2022).

Reviews

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

billy-ray does it again. everything i crave to feel from poetry was in this collection. stunning and perfect.

“Mostly I want to be undone without being ruined”

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my most anticipated 2025 releases and I absolutely loved it. Billy-Ray Belcourt did it again and The Idea of An Entire Life made me cry. These poems are written beautifully and bring such depth and insight to his experiences as a Queer Cree man. My fave poem was 20th-Century Cree History. I will definitely be reading this collection again!

[Jacob Alvarado · Rating 5 out of 5]

"On some maps, there / are the republics of Poetry and Death / and all that's between them is a lush forest. / That forest is called Listening Carefully. / The point is to get lost, / become a tree."

[Vanessa Valenzuela · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What if in the midst of too many objects I become one?”
This collection of poems was so beautifully written. I was enthralled the entire time I was reading.

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tant de bo un llibre de Billy-Ray Belcourt per cada desembre.

[Melina · Rating 5 out of 5]

" [...] I saw the arc
of my entire life and there was an equal amount
of joy and heartache and somehow I still loved
the idea of An Entire Life."

I fucking love enjambements.
art. pure art.

[Seth Stomberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

”What shape must our poems take? Maybe a sonnet can be a gay space that is weirdly liberating…

I love how much queer sense we make even when we’re sad and defeated.”

Oh this legendary book. There are so many pages I’ve dog-eared and underlined. His interpretation of the past, present, and future are so intriguing. His queerness drenched every poem. I will be buying every one of his books.

[Julianna Wagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful as always

[Trin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belcourt is a queer Cree poet whose fiction I have enjoyed; it has a lyrical quality that makes these sonnets and free verse poems feel like a natural extension, or vice versa. There's an exuberance and subtle humor to some of these that remind me of Whitman, and a sense of hope even when Belcourt's themes are dark. No one poem really blew me away, but there was an undercurrent of strength paired with playfulness in these works that makes me feel like I will want to revisit them and see what I get from them on a second visit.

[Settare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautiful collection of poems, such a pleasure to read.
Explores queerness, love, loss, grief, colonial violence, indigenousness, and the body; everything I needed to read poetry about in the past few weeks.

“Even death is a beginning. What is the subtext
of my sadness? How do I live in the world
if I don't love it? Many days I'm hysterical.
I remember the wind and what the wind
rustles through. A man speaks to me
in a human voice. I try to admire what's
left of the future, which flickers.”

[lissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

”I love the small gestures that permit us, I love being intent to be lost”

My my what an emotional unveiling. What I love most about poetry is the abandonment in which poets so freely reveal their truths. Ugly, nasty, raw, beautiful and sincere truths.

To live and write with abandonment is poetry.

This collection reflects deeply on the 21st century, while claiming we never truly left the previous one. It’s a look at the stagnation of queerness, love, loss and moving forward.

Written in a series of sonnets and lyrical prose, the poems come out as intended, destructive and true to his philosophical style. Each ending leads to a thoughtful pondering. Humorous and also heartbreaking, the sinking question looms: why haven’t things changed?

“Mostly I want to be undone without being ruined.”

same.

[thank you @beaconpress @nakinisowin for this gifted copy!]

[Christian Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The problem with pleasure is that
two people can meet in a room
in order to exist less
-The Problem With Pleasure

Can a person exist without being delimited? Do our ideas of utopia remind us of our immanence? Is transcendence possible at all when the world is often nothing but an excessive reminder of our being in it?

You'll find yourself with a lot of questions after reading Belcourt; geniuses often leave you with questions. But Belcourt asks them in such a way that you feel as if it's no big deal if the questions go unanswered. There is freedom in the very idea of existence when the question is asked. I find myself again in awe of the pain his words can carry. The unrelenting joy that follows. Munoz would have written of Belcourt in Cruising Utopia if he had had the chance.

What is an entire life? I don't really know, but Belcourt gives us pieces from which we can ask further questions.
10/10(as always)

[maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“i now know that to be a homosexual is to be a theorist and an architect and an archivist and, of course, a poet.”

i’ve never met a billy-ray belcourt book i didn’t love, and this was no exception. brilliant and beautiful as ever.

[Novi · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

first book read through a recommendation given to me through a youtube video
started reading while flying to philly to visit some friends

fav poems:
-realism
-the problem with pleasure
-endnotes

[Caleb Tankersley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so damn good I immediately started back at the first poem and read the whole thing over again. I kept having to stop and breathe to recover from that feeling of fireworks going off in my brain. Just beautiful.

[Elena Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this

[Pascale · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What do I want from literature, anyway?
A new way of living, a new way to talk
about the trees that doesn't endanger them."
-From Endnotes

[Whatithinkaboutthisbook · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Pub Date

“To exist is a pain we have to keep bearing”

I’ve long admired Billy-Ray Belcourt’s writing and I was eagerly anticipating his new work and it did not disappoint. It delivers an emotional wallop. It’s lyrical, vulnerable, and thought provoking.

His poetry is hauntingly beautiful, and powerfully emotive, laced with the philosophical depth that is uniquely his. His poetry blends and balances pain and joy, despair and hope all the while expressing a longing for a world that is different - safe, free and liberating.

It is impossible to read this and not feel deeply impacted emotionally. I’ve already read this twice and I know I will pick it up again.

[Keeley · Rating 5 out of 5]

a signed copy of a poetry collection by my favourite author from my best friends? oh 6 stars fr. such beautiful and devastating words as always

[Robyn Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Belcourts writing always makes me hopeful. It’s like his poems place me in his memories and my own, in sadness and grief, and warmth hugged by the land and family. But the hopefulness is something sweet to taste and I really appreciate how his poems linger in the light of my body.

I read this book twice over the past couple months and different poems usually present themselves but very similar feelings. His poems also encourage me to write and give me hope that I can publish a collection one day.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billy-Rag Belcourt is hands down one of my favourite authors!!!! Lots of times I feel like I don't understand poetry but I just get Belcourt's writing. some of the lines just make you stop and re-read the words. Beautiful as always. 💕

[Brooke Eubanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

My oh my, this was really beautiful. If this collection were a triptych, the main panel really held me. I loved the rhythm of each sonnet, where every end was a beginning. I loved how it felt like a collection by a historian, archivist, child, man, anthropologist, all at once. I love how it complicates our understanding of the past and present. I could list enough quotes from this collection to hit the max character count, but here goes five:

“Indulging in the image of someone elses queer magnificence / can be a necessary act.”

“I became a homosexual because / pleasure was an aspiration, a structure of feeling I / knew as the vague shape of what would save my life. / I now know that to be a homosexual is to be a theorist / and an architect and an archivist and, of course, a poet. / We have to reject our negation, we have to harness / our love and joy in the act of utopian transformation.”

“I still / don't think we are in that unimaginable place / that is safe for men who desire men. Sure, the apps / turned the city into one big sexual fantasy, but / my suspicion is that there's something more joyfully resonant out there, among flowers, in / the blurry horizon where revolution awaits us. / Sure, we have failed, but we have to keep imagining, / we have to keep exceeding our conditions of / possibility, late capitalism's usual formulations! / We can still become what we will one day touch!”

“Dear former / lovers, I'm sorry I was always finding ways to be / less present. I'm sorry that I was more aroused / by an image than real life. When I write about us / in the past tense we seem more alive. When I write / about us in the present tense the poem becomes / a eulogy. As far as I know, all of us are still living. It / doesn't have to hurt to dwell in someone else's image.”

“We spent most weekends / together; we created our own pleasure principle, / our own interchangeable reality where every gesture / and gaze vibrated with a latent sexuality. I broke up / with him because he was sexting other men. I could not / imagine a nexus of erotic collaboration, I wanted / our world to be small and enchanted.”

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tore the bookmark given to me with the purchase into many tiny pieces and used them as bookmarks to flag so many poems in this slender collection that it's almost as many bookmarks as pages. Some mark the poems I want to engage in my dissertation (from "Endnotes:" "What do I want from literature anyway? / A new way of living, a new way to talk / about the trees that doesn't endanger them"), but most of them flag the poems I want to keep coming back to, like "The Past Tense:" "I do not have a / mother tongue. / A mouth without / a mother tongue / speaks in each echoes. / My words ricochet. / I chase after them, / even though / they're mostly / dying light."

This collection, like the title indicates, is very much an idea, or a set of them, about how to structure responses--and response-abilities--to Indigenous vitalities, temporalities, memories as cumulative and not only contingent: "The past is not an admirable text; it is a mausoleum. / I want to call attention to the dead, to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world" (from "The Cruising Utopia Sonnets," Sonnet 10).

Using the sonnet form in "The Cruising Utopia Sonnets" to explore Indigenous temporalities and queerness is a clever nod to the sonnet's literary tradition, and is also, oof, heartwrenching. Belcourt knowingly recalls Shakespeare's Fair Youth sonnets ("O thou my lovely boy, who in thy pow'r / Dost hold time's fickle glass, his fickle hour, / Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st, / Thy lover's with'ring, as thy sweet self grow'st" (Sonnet 126)). Belcourt even writes, "I was not a beautiful young man" (from Sonnet 12), which I read as his confrontation of the notion of the ideal poetic subject and a recognition of Indigiqueerness.

This collection is about all the acts of repair that hold a person's fragments together. Belcourt continues to produce magic.

[Ember Sappington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quotes because my words could not do it justice:

“Have I always been firmly in the world?
No: I have been out of in the middle of August.”

“The self emerges in the absence of better information.”

“Memory is an enduring indeterminacy.”

“Oh faith, that dysfunctional little house was shining windows.”

“Our belongings are so rarely pure and simple. I love the small gestures that permit us, I love being intent to be lost, I love how much queer since we make even when we’re sad. I have an in particular message for all of you: to exist is a pain we have to keep bearing.”

“The past is not an admirable text; it is a mausoleum.”

I want to call attention to the dead, to the barely living. I want to remind you of the gravity and the challenge of responding to the world, simply being in the world.

“ Pleasure was an aspiration, a structure, a feeling I knew was the vague shape of what would save my life. We have to protest our own negation, we have to harness our love and joy in the act of the transformation. Our social intercourse is not just some silly exchange!”

“On some maps, there are republics of Poetry and Death and all that’s between them is a lush forest. The forest called, Listening Carefully. The point is to get lost, become a tree.”

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As a boy, I waded in the water; I now realize that that was my first poem."

Featuring poems with titles like "Endnotes" and "Fieldnotes", THE IDEA OF AN ENTIRE LIFE finds a point of genesis in colonial approaches to accumulating knowledge, examining or redacting these texts to envision pasts and futures for indigenous communities. Belcourt's verse is elegantly tuned and often in an aphoristic mode, finding its effect in short, cryptic observations which in some places resemble koans: "Utopia is an impossible demand. Most likely,/it's what happens when no one's looking" or "A human body is reminiscent of a sentence/in that it too can taste like dust". These fragments weave together into a narrative about indigenous identity, queer life, and loneliness, reconstructing a sense of hope amidst its vision of a damaged world. Some of Belcourt's works lean perhaps too heavily on academic jargon—I think of lines like "I belong to a circuit of dialectical/tensions between my friends and my sexual/acquaintances"—but the startling and often devastating simplicity of the ideas he expresses helps electrify his verse.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so excited when I received this ARC on Netgalley. I've read almost all of Belcourt's other works, and I was so excited to see another poetry collection from the author. One again, the poems are insightful, tender, and full to the brim of quiet reflection and musings.
The sharing of the Queer Indigenous experience is so cleverly explored throughout the collection, and even more than that the poems themselves speak to the author's own unique voice and experiences. My favourite poem was "An Entire Life" written for Brenda Draney (one of my favourite contemporary painters).
Each poem has beautiful imagery and a simple way of storytelling that still packs a punch and leaves a lasting impression of tenderness.

[Amanda Aldrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giveaway ARC: As a teen I devoured the works of Shelly, Keats,and Poe like my favorite dessert; reading them over and over. In my adult life, I wrote poetry to quiet my chaotic mind. But “The Idea of an Entire Life” showed me a landscape of poetry that I hadn’t seen. Beautifully written and thought provoking, the prose sticks in your consciousness forcing you to confront not only the reality of the author and the history of a group of people you may never know, but also your own reality and that of your ancestors. I took my time reading this; digesting each poem or set of poems before taking on the next. It gave me a greater appreciation for poetry, history, and life.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Belcourt is frank and unsentimental in this collection of poems. He explores many tough topics such as sexuality, indigenous poverty, and colonial suppression in an unsparing way that touched me at times. I feel that I didn’t quite “get” his message in many of these poems, but there were several that touched my heart and/or opened my eyes to the struggles of both Belcourt and his people.
Many thanks to Belcourt and Beacon Press for the opportunity of reading and reviewing this book.

[Sarina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read a book of poetry in quite a while and “the idea of an entire life” was a beautiful reintroduction to form as well as Belcourt’s work. Belcourt uses language to paint feeling and experience onto the page in a way that felt uncanny. I’m glad I own a physical copy, as I imagine I’ll return to various individual poems/lines frequently. I have also been left looking that much more forward to reading Muñoza’s Cruising Utopia and subsequently rereading all of the cruising utopia sonnets!
*I received this book for free as a winner of a goodreads giveaway contest*

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed everything I've read by Belcourt, and this collection is no exception. I highlighted a number of really stunning lines — he really excels at a line-by-line level — but no single poem truly stopped me in my tracks, which tends to be the feeling I'm chasing when reading poetry. I wish I had been able to listen to this in audio (or by extension, hear Belcourt read these poems) as I have no doubt they'd really come to life in that way. But there's much to love for existing readers of Belcourt's work and new ones alike.