A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds.

Across the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.

An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.

Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut book of poems, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and was named the Most Significant Book of Poetry in English by an Emerging Indigenous Writer at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award. It was named by CBC Books as one of the best Canadian poetry collections of the year. Billy-Ray is a Ph.D. student and a 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Wadham College at the University of Oxford.

Billy-Ray Belcourt's profile page

“A feat of beauty and compression, every sentence reinventing the reader. Belcourt is the rare writer who composes from, to, and because of the soul. It’s been some time since I loved a book so deeply.”
—Claudia Dey, author of Daughter
“Belcourt has written an homage and an elegy to a still-unfolding history—as intimate and hopeful as young romance, as mysterious and life-giving as family. I adore this collection.”
—Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies
“Coexistence filled my heart and lifted my spirit. There are few writers who can authentically capture the beauty and complexity of Indigenous existence both on the rez and in the city like Billy-Ray Belcourt.”
—Waubgeshig Rice, author of Moon of the Turning Leaves
“There are sentences in this collection that I didn’t know I had been waiting to read; my breath caught on several of them. I suspect that readers will be letting out collective sighs while reading this book.”
—Helen Knott, author of Becoming a Matriarch
“What haunts me most about these powerful stories is the author’s heart-blasted willingness to be vulnerable on the page. This engaging, alive text drills right to heart of what it is to be Indigenous in the twenty-first century.”
—Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
“These characters’ passionate insistence on loving and desiring and hoping, amid the existential terror of colonization—and Belcourt’s nuanced and attentive rendering of it—is the most revolutionary of acts.”
—Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao
“Belcourt sheds light on the transformative potential of love. . . . These wise and open-hearted stories astonish.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Explores Indigenous life on the rez and in the city, family and community bonds, queer love, art and survival—all within the paradox of grief and joy of contemporary Indigenous life . . . Exquisite writing.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“An instinctive, liberating short story collection.”
—Vancouver Sun
“A closely rendered portrait of love as a vessel for healing and Indigenous joy. . . . Belcourt cleverly invites the reader to follow his characters into the moments of transformation that spur an expansive shift in how we allow ourselves to love, which has the effect of opening a door. . . . I want to spend my life walking through those doors described in these stories. I think many of us do.”
—The Tyee

“Belcourt tries his hand at short stories here . . . proving to be without peer when it comes to empathetically translating the quotidian of daily existence into spiritual portraiture. 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.”
—Library Journal