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*** 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, Finalist. * A Best Book of 2020 — *Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail* , Largehearted Boy, Maudlin House “In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the ‘ruins of the museum of political depression’ springs a ‘tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.’ Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance.” —Michelle Hart, *O, The Oprah Magazine* *Synopsis* ** The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of *Heart Berries* by Terese Marie Mailhot, *A History of My Brief Body* is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, *A History of My Brief Body* demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.