The Problem With Pleasure
by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Most days I’ve wanted
to be my desires and not merely
the unrelenting density
from which they rush forth.
The problem with pleasure is that
two people can meet in a room
in order to exist less. It’s not that
I disliked myself; it’s that no one
told me it was possible to feel
that much of the world all at once.
I felt everything; I was constantly
coming apart, like an orange, half-
peeled on the table, a life split in
two ways: toward the past, which
I couldn’t free myself from, and
toward the future, which is to say,
toward both ecstasy and pain.
At some point I decided
there was no use in parsing
the difference. At some point
I realized I had, without
noticing, become the difference.

Billy-Ray Belcourt (Jaye Simpson)

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the bestselling author of the Griffin Poetry Prize– and Indigenous Voices Award–winning This Wound is a World, as well as NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, A Minor Chorus, and Coexistence. He is an associate professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

David Garneau is a Métis painter, writer, curator, and educator based on Treaty 4 lands, Saskatchewan. He is one of Canada’s foremost Métis artists and public intellectuals, who has been leading the charge in complex conversations around the nuances of Métis identity and the politics of Indigeneity, Indigenization, and non-colonial aesthetics. Garneau is the winner of the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual and Media Arts.

Dark Chapters brings together 17 poets, fiction writers, curators, and critics, including Jesse Wente, Larissa Lai, Paul Seesequasis, Peter Morin, and Susan Musgrave, in a multifaceted reflection on the paintings of David Garneau’s still life series “Dark Chapters” and contemporary Indigenous experiences.

Excerpted from: Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau by David Garneau, curated by Arin Fay, Nic Wilson, ed. Artwork (A Problem With Pleasure) copyright 2025 © David Garneau. Text (“The Problem With Pleasure”) copyright 2025 © Billy-Ray Belcourt. Published by University of Regina Press. Reproduced by arrangements with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau publishes on March 25.