A History of My Brief Body

Each book, each poem, each story is against the trauma of description, those ways of reading and listening that make vampires out of people, possessed by an insatiable hunger for a racialized simplicity that makes us into objects of study to be fed through the poorly oiled machines of analysis.

I can't really rate this because it's mixed. I have a high tolerance for – even a love for – discursiveness, opaqueness, and density. . . but parts of these felt like a literary theory dissertation making claims about ontologies and futurities and that's not for me. (Not everything is made precisely for me and my enjoyment, shockingly.) As a general rule, the less tethered to his personal life and experiences his writing became, the less I enjoyed it. And I really didn't get his argument that the aesthetic function of fiction is to “to whisper, to hide critique” – he really didn't elaborate on that beyond to write vaguely and poetically about it. Idk, that one bugged me.

Again, the closer to his lived life it was, the more I liked it. The last essay in particular, “To Hang Our Grief Up To Dry,” is absolutely chills-inducingly beautiful.

A galvanizing series of essays that blur the line between memoir and think piece. The author is palpably a poet, in that I struggled to adapt to his gorgeously complex phrasing, but found it all the more affecting and informative for not coddling the reader. 
It is heartening to see Belcourt push towards a future of creative joy, while consistently elucidating all the ways in which the Canada of the past and present hampers the possibility of such a life experience for Indigenous people. 
Discussions of life as a queer man of colour likewise indicates the striving for love and the social and structural impediments to finding it. 
It is enjoyable to see a writer frequently touch on a sentence or two written by others, you get this sense of collaborative inspiration, of sharing ideas, when otherwise I worry that writing is isolating, in the search for a ‘pure' inspiration not to be intermingled with words that might be claimed by another.
I think it's because I usually see it in research/journalistic non-fiction, seeing citation/quotes in a memoir provides hope of a full life,  reading and discussion between fellow writers. 
As with other non-fiction personal works written by Black, Indigenous and people of colour I have encountered as a white reader, I am reminded that reading alone will not suffice. Action must be taken, so that the liveable future so many minorities have long been fighting for and creating art to encourage into existence may become a reality, via the restructure of systems, (as well as hearts and minds), long incapable and seemingly uncaring, of meeting all citizens' needs.