The Idea of an Entire Life

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.

A Time Magazine 'Must-Read Book' 2025Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt. In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes slyly humorous—are always finely crafted, putting 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 grief and awe. ‘When I wrote my first book of poetry,’ reflects Belcourt, ‘I wrote from a place of desperation. I wanted very desperately to live a full queer Indigenous life and I wasn’t sure if I would attain it. The Idea of an Entire Life began with the realization that I have that life now and so I wanted to think through the ways a queer Indigenous life is hampered by history but nonetheless full of possibility. What will the rest of my life make available to me? How has the twentieth century indelibly shaped me and my community? The book is about my reserve in northern Alberta, how the past tailgates me wherever I go. It’s also about my coming-into-being as a queer Indigenous man and how I’ve tried to remake my conditions of living to enable flourishing and possibility.’