Review of The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt
By Natalie Co
The Idea of an Entire Life, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s new poetry collection, evades linearity. Belcourt, a queer writer and member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, upends linear time by interrogating the act of documentation. Poems titled “Autofiction,” “Fieldnotes,” “Endnotes,” and “20th-Century Cree History” appear multiple times, each with something different to say; another titled “Preludes” arrives in the middle of the collection. History is always happening, and the myth of the future lies just beyond—or behind—the horizon. In other words, “the present consists / of that which precedes it” (“The Past Tense”), while “in years, it still / won’t be the future,” the future being “something / we leave behind” (“Sincerity”). Time is revolving around something. The Treaty 8 document forced Cree, Beaver, Chipewyan, and other First Nations to surrender land to the government; uprooted and uproots countless lives; and chains them to “the end of the 19th century,” when the document was signed. “We are not citizens of a country,” says the speaker in the first of the collection’s four “Fieldnotes,” “we are citizens of a century.”
Time is one dwelling. The speaker in “The Past Tense” also contends that “a man is a difficult thing / to dwell inside of.” In conversation with José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, a work of theory on queer futurity, Belcourt strings together a continuous series of “Cruising Utopia Sonnets.” The speaker “want[s] to believe / in the possibility of an existing gay lifeworld.” This world glints, just out of reach. Belcourt’s series of sonnets are far-reaching in their intense vulnerability. They cruise through sex, love, physical distance, and the danger and reality of queer love in the present day. Still, the speaker finds freedom in the possibility of a sonnet as “a gay space that is weirdly / liberating.” In this pocket of existence where desire, time, and place dance in circles, the speaker exclaims that “we can still become what we will one day touch!”
Even as time turns the seasons and the world sinks into hibernation, life persists. In “A Prayer,” the speaker resides on the west coast, where “‘the earth is still green.’” This land is elusive, weaving around words and meaning. Forests are tied to desperation (“Fieldnotes”), are the act of listening that bridge poetry and death (“Sentimentality”), and, in an erasure poem referencing settler correspondence over Treaty 8, join with time as the “well wooded years in all of us” (“Fieldnotes”). Winter is both something to be outlasted (“Perspective”) and the kingdom of “bright light” in which everything will eventually be buried beneath snow (“Subarctica”). The lake is the speaker’s ancestor (“Fieldnotes”), the language of “its long edge a line breaking / at [their] exposed feet” (“Future Thinking”).
Neither the land nor the people that inhabit it can be contained within a single record. Belcourt’s collection archives hope and despair, but it also reaches for something just beyond the “equal amount / of joy and heartache” in his speaker’s life (“An Entire Life”). The circularity and repetition of titles throughout The Idea of an Entire Life dismantles the myth of linear history; on the level of the individual piece, poetry becomes a record of what could be. “I write poems / to remind myself I am in love with a freedom / I haven’t yet experienced,” says the speaker in “Realism.” There, in the distance—beyond the vistas of forests, lakes, winters, bodies, centuries, and documents—it is time for something new to come around the bend.
Edited by Noah Bendsza and Noah Adelman-Ciubotaru.