Billy-Ray Belcourt's favourite Canadian book of 2018: nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon

As the year draws to a close, CBC Books is asking Canadian writers for their favourite Canadian titles of 2018. Billy-Ray Belcourt is the author of This Wound is a World, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

• Billy-Ray Belcourt on writing an 'instruction manual for a queer Indigenous future'

Belcourt recommends reading nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon.

"Lindsay Nixon's nîtisânak​ is an account of what it is to live entirely in the world that neither romanticizes nor catastrophizes the conditions in which we make joy and suffer. Methodologically, Nixon shows us what a truly intersectional writing looks like as they elucidate a theory of ethical living though the entangled categories of race, gender, sexuality and class. What I love most about this book is its camp aesthetic, which places Nixon in a lineage of queer writers who make use of humour, satire and pop culture to explode the status quo in the service of critique and liberatory thought. Nixon writes of LDN: 'Hearing the city through my bedroom window inspired me to write' — there's a city of emotion in this book too; if you hold it close, you might hear that which will inspire you to love delicately and hard, to use Nixon's language."

• These Indigenous artists are taking back the self-love that colonialism stole