AustLit

'It’s cliché to begin with the weather. Like the body, Billy-Ray Belcourt contends, ‘so much is won and lost there’, though in a more fictive, low-stakes kind of way: pathetic fallacy has long been the domain of white men with a bone to pick about their mothers. Still, in the wake of thick, foggy evenings that have pulled the day like a blanket over a bed that’s getting too much use, the break of cold sun on my apartment’s balcony feels aerated with the weight of possibility, a semiotic kind of lightening. I pull myself into wakefulness. Things are less burdened with history, or they exist in memorialised time in which history is allowed to pass with less of its stowed baggage.' (Introduction)