Amber Dawn is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver). She is the author of several books, including two novels, Lambda Literary Award winner, Sub Rosa, and Sodom Road Exit; the poetry collections Where the words end and my body begins, My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems, and Buzzkill Clamshell; and is the editor of three anthologies.
“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 (The Garbage Poems)
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, she 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 it.
In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous.
In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at what we expect from writers, and from each other.
Includes a foreword by writer Doretta Lau.
A memoir about sex work and sexuality, and how writing became the author’s lifeline.
Amber Dawn’s acclaimed first novel Sub Rosa, a darkly intoxicating fantasy about a group of magical prostitutes who band together to fend off bad johns in a fantastical underworld, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2011. How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn’s sophomore book, reveals an even more poignant and personal landscape–the terrain of sex work, queer identity, and survivor pride. This story, told in prose and poetry, offers a frank, multifaceted portrait of the author’s experiences hustling the streets of Vancouver, and how those years took away her self-esteem and nearly destroyed her; at the crux of this autobiographical narrative is the tender celebration of poetry and literature, which–as the title suggests–acted as a lifeline during her most pivotal moments.
As raw and fiery as its author, How Poetry Saved My Life is a powerful account of survival and the transformative power of literature.
Starring Amber Dawn, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ben Ladouceur & jaye simpson. Featuring Timothonious & Jane Madeleine. Hosted by Paula Turcotte
Presented by Wordfest and Pansy Club YYC. Starring Amber Dawn & jaye simpson.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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