The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems

One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

From award-winning Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, a dazzling exploration of love, anguish, queerness, and Indigenous resistance in the 21st century

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. Rigorous in research and thought yet accessible in language and imagery, this collection weaves lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine the delicate facets of queer Indigeneity.

Belcourt contends with the afterlife of what he calls “the long twentieth century,” a period marked by assaults on Indigenous life, and his people’s enduring resistance. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, are marked by 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 yet pulled toward a more flourishing future.