It seems Billy-Ray Belcourt's first collection of poetry is shortlisted for another poetry award every other week.

The book This Wound is a World, written by the poet from Driftpile Cree Nation, is up for the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of Canada's most prestigious poetry awards. The winner of the prize, announced June 7, will take home $65,000.

He was also selected as a finalist for an award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Belcourt first learned of his Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist when he woke up one morning to a bunch of phone notifications. He was speechless, he said.

"I'm just incredibly grateful that the book does have the audience that it has," Belcourt told CBC's Radio Active Monday.

This Wound is a World was written over the course of three years. It touches on aspects of Belcourt's identity, as well as the topics of race, gender, sexuality and also the micro-aggressions he faced while studying at Oxford University in the U.K.

His memoir-manifesto mix also unpacked how he could resist colonization.

"It's allowed me to be able to reflect on not only my experiences but what I was seeing in the world around me," Belcourt said.

The book, he said, does something different than his other styles of writing would do. "It reaches a larger, younger audience — an audience of primarily Indigenous youth," he said, adding the book resonates with queer, transgender and other forms of minority identities, especially within the Indigenous perspective.

But the book is resonating with Canadians in general. Belcourt said the usual case of getting an initial bump after publishing a book then it fizzling out hasn't been the case for him.

"It actually amped up," Belcourt said.

If he wins the prize he wants to help out his family to "sort of repay them for the different forms of care they've shown me," he said.

And as his book continues to receive accolades from the Canadian poetry community, Belcourt is hard at work at his second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms, slated for a 2019 release.