Belcourt insists on importance of sincerity

Throughout his latest collection, The Idea of an Entire Life (McClelland & Stewart, 80 pages, $25), Billy-Ray Belcourt returns to the idea that there is something radical in the confessional mode: “I believe in the magnificence of a lake in Northern Alberta// and the radical possibilities of telling strangers/ all my secrets.”

Contrary to the manner in which they are sometimes dismissed, sincerity, sentiment and confession are not mere exercises in solipsism or self-indulgence; rather, Belcourt uses these in the service of solidarity and justice. “What others call Sentimentality/ I call Refusing to Suffer Alone,” he writes in writes in Sentimentality.

While the collection insists on the importance of sincerity and personal experiences, Belcourt refuses to reify these. “The self emerges in/ the absence of better/ information,” he writes in Childhood Triptych.

From the start of the collection, Belcourt plays with the distance of autofiction and field notes to call the nature of selfhood into question and unsettle it, creating a tension that drives the collection.

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Randy Lundy’s attentiveness centres a living world whose well-being is intertwined with ours in his latest collection, Something for the Dark (University of Regina Press, 96 pages, $20).

In the prelude, Letter from Kyoto, he considers the Saskatchewan motto “Land of the Living Skies,” writing, “No one’s thought what the Living of the motto really means. Is it an assertion of the eternal fusion of space-time into a four-dimensional continuum?”

Lundy enacts this interrogation of what living might mean by unspooling a theory of language and poetics, which relies on an embodied, dynamic relation within the world. In An Old Man’s Theory of Language, Lundy follows the birds, which “come and go like thoughts, but they are not thoughts./ They are not words.”

Identity and identicality aren’t the relations that Lundy prioritizes. Here, he makes alterity and ephemerality echo: “On the wings of itinerant birds, syllables/ rise into the skies of our minds, come/ to rest in our mouths, nest/ on our tongues.”

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Jason Purcell’s long poem Crohnic (Arsenal Pulp, 104 pages, $20) enacts a revolutionary possibility in disability narratives. The poem is at once a chronicle of the process of diagnosing and treating Crohn’s disease, and a meditation on the North Saskatchewan River and the speaker’s relation to it.

The poem opens with the speaker, on the banks of the North Saskatchewan, “a shrinking// place where health and death are the same/ temperature where I am calculated and reduced so// there is less of me.”

The river runs through this book — not a counterpoint to the speaker’s illness but, at first as the metaphorical embodiment of his illness and as kin. “When I return to the river woollen/ and partly poisoned I notice// a line in us both that does/ not freeze over.”

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Hajer Mirwali’s astonishing debut collection, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 113 pages, $19), responds to the constraints on young Arab women that come from within their communities and the pressures that come from being part of an othered community. Using repetitions and looping images, formal innovations and ekphrastic engagements, Mirwali breaks down the sharp distinction between 3aib (shameful) or not 3aib (acceptable).

“This is not sustainable Sometimes you can’t be good,” she writes in the second poem called 3aib. In this poem, Mirwali returns to Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, which is comprised of two stainless steel blades revolving in a box of sand, making and unmaking grooves. “I am in the sand/ I am revolting in the sand at the same speed as you I am revolving/ around the same centre xxxxxxx there is only one system/ Of mothers and daughters Only one daughter of/ mothers and systems.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in fall of 2026.