Coexistence

March 15, 2024
This set of interconnected stories explores the lives of Indigenous characters--all of whom are tortured in some way by romantic grief or confusion--in a range of settings across Canada. We encounter a mother who confides to her son about her youthful passion for another girl, a parolee who struggles to orient his need for companionship as a free man, and several artist figures who agonize over their creative and erotic frustrations. The impact of past and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples forms a prominent thematic backdrop here, and the dysfunction plaguing individual characters' lives is overtly linked to systemic forms of trauma. These stories are earnestly told, and the author's concern for drawing attention to marginalized forms of suffering is clear. However, the narrative's didactic impulse--paired with the adolescent sentimentality that is this collection's guiding sensibility--produces rather hollow effects that tend to undermine the plausibility of the individuals it presents to us. The author favors direct summations of his characters' lives and motivations, which often manage to be at once maudlin, portentous, and fuzzy: "He wonders what the world will be without her in it. The truth: it will be nothing and it will be everything." A reliance on academic jargon sometimes takes the place of any genuine psychological probing, as in this description of a man eavesdropping on his neighbors' lovemaking: "Their animal sounds remind me that the I is a trick of the light and that the plural is dense and unbearable." Though the collection aims to confront large themes--most obviously, the impact of colonialism and intergenerational trauma on Indigenous sexuality--it seems, at last, not to illuminate the subjects it would represent, but to evade them. A sincere collection of stories chronicling love and loss.

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Starred review from May 6, 2024
In this scintillating collection from Indigenous Canadian author Belcourt (A Minor Chorus), queer Cree men grapple with the legacy of colonialism. “Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century can mean that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness,” says the narrator of “Lived Experience.” Such conflicting emotions play into his ambivalence about sex, but after swearing off encounters with other men, he falls for a painter named Will, and shows up at Will’s art gallery opening wearing a denim jacket emblazoned with the phrase “GAY 4 PAY JK ABOLISH WORK.” Amorous and economic concerns also overlap in “Poetry Class,” about a poet who believes in the “revolutionary demand” of his craft, while his ex was obsessed with satisfying the market. In the gritty and moving “Outside,” a restless young man named Jack beats a drug trafficking charge, returns from jail to his grandmother’s trailer on the reservation, and matches on Tinder with a neighbor named Lucy. Throughout, Belcourt sheds light on the transformative potential of love, describing, for instance, how Jack is changed by Lucy when she invites him into her life, which “open space inside his mind for different memories” and drives him to “give over to new pasts, future emotional histories.” These wise and open-hearted stories astonish.

June 21, 2024

Those familiar with Belcourt (A Minor Chorus) know him to be an expert of his craft, puckish with form, switchblade-sharp with turns of phrase, and deft at blurring binaries into hazy liminal spaces of joy and pain. But the true magic of his writing comes in the singular way he sees the world in poetic--and aesthetic--terms and puts language to it. After two poetry collections, a work of autobiographical essays, and a novel, Belcourt tries his hand at short stories here, and like those previous efforts, his latest likewise sees the author proving to be without peer when it comes to empathetically translating the quotidian of daily existence into spiritual portraiture. The stories range from young, aimless lives on the edge of rupture to the alternating current of relationships between parents and adult children. The collection is lush and richly observed and made all the more moving thanks to Belcourt's tendency toward first-person narration, which pairs perfectly with his talent for concisely expressing characters' interiority and his ability to locate beauty in bruising. VERDICT Belcourt demonstrates the true strength of the story collection format, leveraging his remarkable skill with character and language to deliver a potpourri of memorable and moving short-form works.--Luke Gorham

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