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"If I'm more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things? What I mean is that I don't subscribe to the fantasy of self-sovereignty, knowing fully that the past starts into my brief body like a knife. My hands are made up of a set of hands that puppeteer me. The hands aren't God's. They are History's. Its sores are mine."

For Belcourt, "Joy is an ethics of resistance", an ecology of feeling in a utopian, anti-institutional world wherein "we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature". The act of writing is an act of care gendered in opposition to the existential threat and political subterfuge of the neocolonial settler state. He's really well-read and it's clearly visible in this poetic, moving text. He marshalls other writers and thinkers in quite an organic fashion to scaffold his thought process where, as he states right at the start, a chief aesthetic concern is beauteous open, plural ambiguity.

It is a call against historical amnesia, where past practices mutate in the present to reenact precarity in the edged lives of marginalized peoples. It celebrates the multitudinous nature of NDNs and how they bear their "racialized burden". It's an indictment of those "impoverished readings" that aim to flatten, to simplify, the profundity of their quotidian lives. These tender, erudite essays ably explore the intersections of queerness and indigeneity in breathtaking ways. "Fatal Naming Rituals", against the "poverty of simplicity", and the titular essay, "an ode to gay fugitivity", were my favourites.