Under Review: The Idea of An Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt

It’s easy to see why Belcourt has won so many literary prizes for his work. His first book of poetry, This Wound is a World (Frontenac House, 2017), won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. His other books, both poetry and prose, were bestsellers and appeared on numerous shortlists, earning multiple literary prize wins. For a young writer still in mid-career, he’s accrued an impressive list of accolades.

In his nine-part poem “The Past Tense,” Belcourt delineates, “The present consists / of that which precedes it,” and “Inside the past / are my family’s memories.” This formulation refuses any clean division between now and then. There’s a tension in the speaker’s personal history and pain, too—particularly the gut punch of a line in part eight: “I am too young to have / to remember so much.” This interplay between past, present, and future runs throughout his poems; as the speaker tries to make sense of time and its dimensions, so does the reader. The final line of part nine in “The Past Tense” is another powerful zinger: “I had been listening in the past tense.” The past is full of sorrow, pinning him down. In “The Cruising Utopia Sonnets,” the speaker says, “I hold the past / like a dead bird.” His past, inescapable, is a fragile thing that cannot be resuscitated.

In “Childhood Triptych,” the speaker shares tragic beginnings; his father “would give us up / after about one year.” The word choice of “give us up” is especially heartbreaking. It’s this specificity of a father giving up his family, as opposed to merely leaving, that cuts deep. In the following few lines, he turns to the deflation of his early high hopes:

“I now understand that

hope cannot be bought;

it is passed around,

like cutlery.”

“Hope” is another theme that keeps brushing up against Belcourt’s narrator. Taking an abstract emotion like “hope” and turning it into a pedestrian object like “cutlery” is both humorous and startling. It’s an unexpected simile whose meaning is ambiguous. Perhaps hope, typically an individual concept, turns communal. In “Future Thinking,” the speaker opines, “I had / too much hope.” Hope overflows. There is too much of it; hope punishes the speaker with life’s ensuing disappointments.

The Idea of An Entire Life is full of clever similes and metaphors. They are philosophical, yearning, and painfully honest. The metaphor, “Sometimes my desperation / Was the size of a forest,” from “Fieldnotes” does so much in so few words. It’s confessional without being indulgent, and the melancholy echoes throughout his collection.

The speaker of “An Entire Life” says he believes in “the radical possibilities of telling strangers / all my secrets.” In this meta-moment, we find healing in the teller of these stories and the readers are the “strangers” enfolded in this possibility. Perhaps the speaker is still hopeful, after all.

Belcourt’s speaker makes excellent use of pathetic fallacy in this collection: “leaves tremble” like the speaker does in “An Entire Life.” In “Fieldnotes,” he mentions his “small, trembling life.” This trembling has expanded to envelop the speaker’s “entire life,” echoed in the book’s title. “20th-Century Cree History” offers another example of pathetic fallacy: “Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.” An echo of e.e. cummings’s famous line (“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”), the speaker projects his hunger onto the snow. The speaker is trembling, fearful, and hungry.

The idea of hunger persists in “The Past Tense,” the speaker proclaiming, “I am as hungry / as a shoreline.” This simile uses pathetic fallacy once again to get its point across. The speaker’s hunger appears as vast, unending as a shoreline, and like the snow, it blankets everything. The speaker’s emotions are overwhelming; he expresses them by projecting them onto his surrounding landscape.

Belcourt uses original and effective language, whether he is talking about time, history, queerness, or his own outsized feelings. The Idea of An Entire Life encourages multiple readings. Individual lines stand out and individual poems call for explication; in “Sentimentality,” his protagonist queries, “Is each poem a kind / of calling outward from a place / near death?” It’s a question that is difficult to answer. Is this a rhetorical question? The philosophizing in The Idea of An Entire Life is sophisticated and weighty. Personal and collective history collides; it’s a fascinating collection of poems that only confirms why this poet is so well celebrated.

The Idea of An Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt

McClelland & Stewart, 9 September 2025

80 pages

$25.00