The Opposite of the World

Petala Ironcloud interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt about his new poetry collection.

By Petala Ironcloud December 15, 2025

• Poetry

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT’S new collection, The Idea of an Entire Life, is a meditation on what it means to exist in multiple temporalities at once—to be Cree and queer in a present still structured by colonial violence, where “the twentieth century never ended.” Through sonnets, field notes, and fragmented lyrics, Belcourt maps Indigenous and queer futurity not as a distant promise but as a daily practice, enacted in the ruins of what he calls “a wounded century.”

The collection extends a lineage of Native poets—Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier—who write in direct refusal of the American canon’s treatment of Indigeneity. Where Walt Whitman conflated Indigenous peoples with vanishing wilderness and Ralph Waldo Emerson mourned removal as tragic but inevitable, these poets insist on presence, on speaking back. Belcourt adds to this project an exploration of desire as both trap and liberation. “On Grindr, my profile stated: DESIRE IS A PLANET / TRAPPED INSIDE AN EVEN BIGGER PLANET,” he writes, staging containment at cosmic scale—the body holding desire, the world holding the body, history holding it all.

Throughout the collection, Belcourt’s grandmother, his kokum, appears as both witness and addressee, embodying what he calls, after Roland Barthes, a “painful availability” to the past. When he tells her he’s homesick, she responds: “If heaven is a place, my dear, / I’m afraid it’s already underwater”—a haunting that links ancestral loss to climate catastrophe, past dispossession to imminent collapse. Time refuses to stay linear. The archive intrudes: a 1935 letter details an Indian agent withholding rations from J. B. Gambler, a Cree man who tried to rescue his children from a residential school. Belcourt writes himself into this historical present, acknowledging that “the present consists / of that which precedes it.”

Yet The Idea of an Entire Life is not only elegiac. Belcourt also participates in what Audra Simpson calls a “politics of refusal”—rejecting the colonial demand to be legible, categorized, governed. His poems operate as what he terms “fugitive” spaces, dreamworlds where lyric becomes escape rather than enclosure. In “The Cruising Utopia Sonnets,” he collaborates directly with José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory, building poems from keywords and phrases to create “a plural voice with a mixed autobiography.” The sonnet form itself becomes, as Belcourt writes, “a gay space that is weirdly liberating.”

Where Pico translates millennial embodiment into abbreviated digital code, Belcourt writes at a studied distance from the internet, creating what he calls a “lyric vernacular”—language that addresses Indigenous and queer readers directly while interrogating the limits of address itself. His work aligns with a tradition of Indigenous abstraction, from Métis quillwork to George Morrison’s horizon paintings, where landscape becomes both subject and ancestor. “The lake is my ancestor, / even if it will outlast me,” Belcourt writes, collapsing personal and geological time.

In our conversation, we discuss form and fugitivity, the archive and desire, what it means to write from and toward communities the state refuses to recognize, and how poetry makes room for forms of life and love that exist otherwise.

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PETALA IRONCLOUD: You move through so many forms in The Idea of an Entire Life—sonnets, field notes, fragmented lyrics. How did you decide which forms could hold which aspects of the book’s exploration?

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT: This book represents my most rigorous attempt at the sonnet form, though I came to it wanting to disobey the rules. I think of myself as part of a school of “sonneteers,” beginning from an instinct to resist while still believing in the sonnet’s capacity to express something ineffable about love and desire. The 14-line structure is both a container and a site of possibility—it’s limited, but its limits can be productive.

The more fragmented lyric poems come naturally to me; compression feels like my native mode. I jot lines in my phone, often on the go. Maybe that stems from my early love of Twitter—when poets and nonpoets alike learned how to make language feel alive in a small space. I’ve always thought of poetry as a way to make language do something new with very little room to move.

The “Cruising Utopia” sonnet sequence directly engages with José Esteban Muñoz. How did you approach that method of collaboration with theory—of blending voices and ideas?

Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia changed how I live and think. It was the first text that encouraged me to imagine queerness as estrangement from the present—a politically viable mode of being. I wanted to honor that by writing a sequence that sits beside his ideas, using them as scaffolding.

I began by asking “What if I wrote with Muñoz, not about him?” My voice dominates the sonnets, but his concepts—queerness as futurity, utopia as potential—are embedded throughout. The result, I hope, is a synthesis: a collaboration across time and form that owes everything to his vision of queerness as a horizon pointing toward another kind of world.

You write that the 20th century never ended for Indigenous people. How does that temporal dislocation shape the book’s poetics?

For many Indigenous nations, the 20th century persists—through policy, discourse, and the material conditions of our lives. I’m skeptical of the idea that the 21st century marks some postcolonial moment. The state has simply refined its techniques of control.

So when I write, I’m often thinking about how we continue to live in the aftermath of a century that hasn’t really closed. My work tries to give form to that haunting: how the psychic, physiological, and emotional residue of colonialism still determines what feels possible. We’re still trying to figure out how to be with each other inside a state that’s only marginally less violent than before.

The collection also includes archival documents—like the 1935 letter about J. B. Gambler and Treaty 8 correspondence. How do you approach the archive differently as a poet versus as a scholar?

My relationship to the archive is improvisational and incomplete. I stumbled across that 1935 letter online—someone related to the man described had posted it. I remember scrolling one night, seeing my community named, and realizing that the past had collapsed into the present. Poetry allowed me to sit in that collapse, to make it legible as feeling rather than as data.

Most of the documents I use I found through digital wandering. But I also write about the alienation of the physical archive. A friend once told me there were records in Regina, Canada, relevant to my work. I still haven’t gone. Part of me resists those spaces—their orientation toward containment rather than relation. The poems are my way of refusing that alienation, of reclaiming history as something we carry, not something administered.

This collection intertwines queer cruising, hookup apps, and anonymous encounters with utopia and transformation. How did these everyday practices become sites of theoretical possibility for you?

One of theory’s central axioms is that daily life—how we love, move, desire—is a kind of political practice. Poetry has always been my way of combining the mundane and the theoretical.

In my early twenties, cruising was both erotic and intellectual terrain. It was a time of psychological intensity, of seeking recognition in fleeting encounters. For queer Indigenous people, those experiences are rarely represented in public discourse. I wanted to document them—to give form to that solitude and connection.

Sometimes, in rural or reserve contexts, people drive hours for a brief encounter. That geography of desire carries its own poetry. It reveals how queerness and Indigeneity can coexist even in spaces that seem hostile to both.

You write about wanting to be “aroused by the opposite of the world” rather than by the world itself. Can you expand on this relationship between desire and refusal?

I’ve written elsewhere that to be a queer man is to arrive either too early or too late to the world. The world as it exists isn’t designed for our desires. Reading Muñoz taught me that another world is still possible—that queerness can be a method of reaching for it.

I’m interested in what happens when we center pleasure rather than injury in our social imagination. For many of us, our relationship to society is mediated through pain and exclusion. But what if pleasure were the organizing principle of the world? Poetry, for me, arises from that desire—to imagine freedom as an erotic and social force.

Several poems address not having a mother tongue, and writing in a “second language.” How does that linguistic dispossession shape your approach to lyric expression?

I was deeply moved by Solmaz Sharif’s statement that English is the language of her dispossession. That resonates with me completely. English is the colonial language I live in, but I refuse to let it defeat me.

Many Indigenous poets before me have turned English against itself—to write toward freedom from the very thing that constrains us. When I write a poem that feels right, I sense I’m coming as close as I can to thinking and being in my ancestral language. Poetry lets me move toward that horizon, even if I can’t reach it.

This book marks your return to poetry after two novels. How has fiction writing changed your approach to the poem?

Fiction required me to subdue my poetic instincts—to think about plot, continuity, the reader’s attention. But I never stopped being a poet. I smuggled poems into my novels whenever I could.

Returning to poetry felt like returning home. It’s my first language, my mother tongue. Fiction taught me about structure and patience, but poetry remains the most intimate way I know to think on the page.

You’ve described autofiction as central to your work. How does autofiction allow you to explore truth differently from memoir or straightforward lyric?

There’s a line in the book: “Most days, my job is to work out the difference between truth and honesty.” Touring for my 2022 novel A Minor Chorus, I was often asked how autobiographical it was. That question—so often directed at Indigenous writers—assumes that we can only make art from lived experience.

For me, fiction and poetry are both exercises in honesty rather than in literal truth. Even when I’m inventing lives, I’m being honest about the conditions of our world. Radical honesty is the thread that runs through all my work—it’s how I make the present visible.

You redact parts of a settler correspondence in one of the “Fieldnotes” poems. Can you talk about that decision?

Redaction is one of my favorite poetic tools. It allows me to intervene in the language of officialdom—to disrupt bureaucratic speech that claims authority. By creating negative space, something else emerges.

Visually, redaction mirrors Indigenous life itself: our presence within erasure, our speech inside silencing. Through that blankness, poetry can write toward new forms of being and refusal.

The book is dedicated “for my friends.” Who were you writing for, and how does imagining your audience shape your work?

I dedicated it to my friends because they make me possible—and by extension, they make my writing possible.

More broadly, I write with queer Indigenous readers in mind. I want the work to hold space for emotional complexity—for feelings the world doesn’t always allow us to have publicly. But I also imagine readers in theory, in academia, who might see the poems as another mode of philosophical engagement.

A book of poetry, to me, is an interpretive architecture—a way to think through histories and theories that are otherwise abstract. It’s a place where knowledge becomes intimate.

What are you reading or thinking with right now that’s shaping your next work?

I keep returning to Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Her writing on haunting—as what happens when histories of oppression are left unacknowledged—feels continuously relevant.

I’m working on a project set in two neighboring communities in Alberta, including my own reserve. There’s a former residential school there, its infrastructure still standing. The community rarely speaks about it, and that silence has weight. I’m trying to write about the psychic life of that repression—what it means to live among haunted buildings and unspoken histories.

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Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of six books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning debut This Wound Is a World (2017). Belcourt serves as the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nîkân, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.

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Featured image: Photo of Billy-Ray Belcourt by jaye simpson.