Poet and 2016 Rhodes Scholar Belcourt applies his prodigious talents to this book of personal essays. Living in Canada as an Indigenous (NDN) person from the Driftpile Cree Nation, Belcourt focuses on the historical and continued oppression of First Nations peoples by the Canadian government and how this oppression affects not only the political but also the personal. For instance, it arrives in his bedroom in the form of Grindr hookups who only sleep with NDNs, or who bashfully tell him he is their first NDN, as if ticking off a box. While he uses his writing to navigate pain, he also uses it to record joy, a form of resistance: "With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance." Belcourt's writing is poetic and philosophical, and often meanders in lovely and thought-provoking ways, whether he writes of colonialism, his grandmother, or his queer/NDN identity. Clearly a student, too, he includes words of other writers, particularly Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson, but his voice is distinctly his own. This timely and intriguing collection would make a great read-alike for Saeed Jones' How We Fight for Our Lives (2019).