Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby - gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer - not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with pain.

Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker and performance artist based in Vancouver. She is the author of the novel Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), editor of the Lambda Award-nominated Fist of the Spider Woman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008) and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005). Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, "Girl on Girl," has been screened in eight countries and added to the gender studies curriculum at Concordia University. She has toured three times with the infamous Sex Workers` Art Show in the US. She was voted Xtra! West`s Hero of the Year in 2008. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she is the director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Amber Dawn's profile page

"Pain is a match," opens Buzzkill Clamshell, and so is this collection: both a hot, bright, sudden flare in the dark and a swipe right, an immense YES of delicious recognition. Unafraid to keen keenly for what's unfinished, wounded, shuttered, Amber Dawn's poetry knows that being a buzzkill is world-making process: mythically vivid and skinless in its witchy vitality that spells and sings exactly the heart of what poetry is. -So Mayer, author of Truth & Dare

I never quite know what I'm going to experience with Amber Dawn's poetry, but I do know I'll get a bit of new sexy language mixed in with some body heat! Buzzkill Clamshell does this with added layers of body horror, body honour, and a little bit of lesbian prayer. Ablaze with poetic dexterity, Buzzkill Clamshell is plush with a lesbian gaze that focuses in on desire, pelvic girdles, body fluids, and an ugly attraction to one's self. Amber Dawn offers us a sarcastic but compassionate view of ourselves. -Sharanpal Ruprai, author of Seva and Pressure Cooker Love Bomb

A Gothic, the theorists tell us, is a text in which the body itself is the site of horror. Or, as Amber Dawn writes, "Beardsley said, 'If I am not grotesque, I am nothing.' wowʍoʍ same." In the neo-Symbolist Gothic that is Buzzkill Clamshell, Amber Dawn spelunks a cunt wrenched with pain to unearth guillotine humor and stunningly rococo analogy - the body as the "fresh mash" of a peach under a boot, a "musical snuffbox," the "filthy keepsakes of a chesterfield sofa." Here are poems that, even as they wrestle with hardship and trauma, celebrate the astonishing joys of weird pop culture flotsam, brim with queer/occult pleasures, and laze about on velvet. This is a verse that offers the possibility of, if not "safe space," than something richer: an astral plane of tenderly kinky ministering. It's been a while since I've been as word-dazzled as I am by this gorgeously wild, punk-formalist collection. I recommend you dose yourself deep. -Arielle Greenberg, co-editor of Gurlesque and Electric Gurlesque

Hold on to your hearts, readers! Queer lit's favourite fierce femme and force of nature Amber Dawn is back, and she's taking no prisoners. Ribald and unrepentant, in turns ferocious and tender, the poems in Buzzkill Clamshell showcase the author's trademark wit and emotional range as they map the terrain of sexuality, aging, chronic illness, and trauma with gorgeous language that is somehow both shocking and subtle. Amber Dawn masterfully reinterprets lyrical and confessional poetic forms, effortlessly weaving motifs drawn from history, mythology, religion, pop culture, and autobiography to illustrate the profound in the profane, and vice versa. Resilience has never looked quite so sexy or so sacred. -Kai Cheng Thom, author of Falling Back in Love With Being Human

Beautiful and ruinous, this horny, rotting Tilt-a-Whirl of a book gutted my brain and rewired it, opening new possibilities for being in relationship with illness and injury in my own body. In an exquisite act of agency, these poems approach chronic pain as collaborator, crafting an erotics of chronic pain that is both raunchy and surprisingly tender, by turns "lewd phantasmagoria" and "softest bouncy castle." Rooted in the tradition of horror as queer playscape for transgressive possibilities, this is a world where "to be monstrous is a perverse medicine." Under the hot filth, the abjection, the camp, the horror, the mythmaking, and the thrilling visceral ride of its inventive language, this book has a thread of devotion, where devotion is staying with something as it is, desiring to know it deeply enough to be transformed. Carmen Maria Machado's queer horror meets Audre Lorde's erotics in a filthy bathroom stall, written as only Amber Dawn ever could. -Anna Swanson, author of The Garbage Poems

Amber Dawn gives us a way to name this book - trauma erotics - but it would be reductionist to say that's all this book is. She also writes the embodied erotics of chronic pain with the precision of a sharp blade. Buzzkill Clamshell's poems pulse with desire, fire, and ache, often overlapping, and ask: How do we revel in the gore of our bodies? In the fantasies of our pain? In the control we have over our own bodies? Or in the relinquishing of that control? Our wounds and flesh become delight in Buzzkill Clamshell; pleasure is a realm we are invited to access and invent. -Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of Knot Body