Billy-Ray Belcourt: The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve

“Everyone’s uncle thinks that they are the world’s most handsome NDN, and no one says otherwise.” With “The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve,” a poem published on 7 June 2018 in The Walrus, 2018 Foundation scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt critically evokes the reservization, intimacy, and violence of Indigenous bodies and lives in Canada.  Billy-Ray’s debut collection of poems, This Wound is a World, was published in September 2017 and won the prestigious Griffin poetry prize. 

Read “The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve” here.