This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Published 2017 · 17,600 words · about 1 hour at an average pace
How hard is This Wound Is a World to read?
This Wound Is a World scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Plain, direct vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Short lines, clear syntax.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Colonial history and desire handled figuratively.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- A speaker close to the poet.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The rez, the body and the wound recur as figures.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Sharp turns against his own statements.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Poems end unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- A sequence with recurring motifs.
How This Wound Is a World is regarded
This Wound Is a World holds a literary regard score of 43 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.