Buzzkill Clamshell - Softcover

Amber Dawn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551529793 ISBN 13: 9781551529790

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Amber Dawn is a poet, memoirist and novelist. She is the author of the novels Sub Rosa (Lambda Literary Award winner) and Sodom Road Exit, the Vancouver Book award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life, and the BC Book Prize-nominated poetry collection Where the words end and my body begins. She is also the editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies, including Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers Poems. She teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

Edition details

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551529793
• ISBN 13: 9781551529790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116