Today our guest is Cree poet and doctoral student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Bily-Ray Belcourt. In addition to his cutting-edge doctoral research on Indigenous queer affect theory that is housed in the liminal space of the spiritual and the real, Billy-Ray recently published a book of poetry via Frontenac Press: This Wound Is A World. Billy-Ray’s poetry seeks to constitute an “effective commons” that offers a figurative, metaphorical, and literal space for the emotional loneliness that we all individually feel but often collectively express. Billy-Ray’s work is erotic in an intellectually gratifying way, nearly as risqué and explicit as one can be while luxuriating in the theroretical gaps and spaces of the post-colonial, queer Indigenous body that looks out on to the world and feels, hurts, loves, aches, and surrenders to the beauty and pain of reality. We discuss Billy-Ray’s version of decolonial love, strategies for inviiting metaphor into poems, the erotics of the armpit, and perhaps most importantly who his Indigneous intellectual crushes are right now. He opens the show with a reading of his poem: “If I Have a Body, Let it be a Book of Sad Poems”.