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(University of Minnesota Press, 57 pages, $15.95.)īilly-Ray Belcourt’s debut, “This Wound Is a World,” seeks to “posit a futurity for the queer Indigenous.” While engaging with contemporary theory, Belcourt writes with delicacy and clarity about how “heartbreak lives in the underbelly of a system.” Individual cruelty, colonialism and systemic violence collide in well-described gestures: a dancer refusing his hand or a white man calling him “wonderfully exotic.” This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourtīy Billy-Ray Belcourt. Readers will thank her for insights like the moon is “an agent of gravity that masquerades/ as light.” “Every poem is a kind of thank you note,” she writes. However, the rest more than makes up for it. The eponymous poem, the most ambitious in terms of research, falls the flattest due to its reliance on clichéd tropes. What makes us human is “simply and disastrously, that we draw lines.” Astonishing mediations join bursts of apt descriptions of drawing: “The line is not right/ but I like it anyway.” Connecting writing and drawing, she unfolds, turn by startling turn, how lines interpret, connect, rend, do violence and create tenderness. Su Smallen Love’s series “Lines That Do Not Exist but We Draw Them” in her sixth collection, “The Memoir of Mona Lisa and Other Poems,” is a truly exciting and deeply intelligent project inspired by her experience taking a drawing class. (Salmon Poetry/Dufour Editions, 104 pages, $20.) The Memoir of Mona Lisa and Other Poems by Su Smallen Loveīy Su Smallen Love.
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