I’ve loved Amber Dawn’s writing since reading her book, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, towards the end of my undergraduate degree. How Poetry Saved My Life was published in 2013, is her second published book after the acclaimed first novel Sub Rosa, and is a City of Vancouver Book Award Winner. It is a stunning combination of poems and moments of her life, organized in prose-like chapters. The book uses poetry to bear witness to the Canadian sex industry, making room for her own desire, trauma, and dignity.
Amber Dawn’s prose and poetry focus on the body’s many roles from the perspective of her personal experience. Her body in Buzzkill Clamshell is machine-like, disconnected, beautiful, collapsing, hurt, joyful, and raunchy. Each poem reads like Amber Dawn is trying to reconstruct herself. I found myself, as I think many others will, appreciating all the lives she builds for her sexual self in this, queering herself in the way that she gets to redefine what sexual pleasure means to her. Not only is this a liberating act, but cathartic for me, and I’m sure any reader who feels being perceived as sexual is inescapable, but who also craves sexuality on their own terms. It is similarly cathartic for those of us trying to figure out how to embody a queer identity, as well as a queer sexuality.
Buzzkill Clamshell captures what it is to live in grieving bodies, to live in bodies grieving themselves and nonetheless celebrating their existence and journey of rebirth. Amber Dawn’s collection unapologetically delves into awkward and ugly parts of sex; this collection is as much about torment as it is about pleasure.
Amber Dawn opens the collection with couplets; “Erotics of Chronic Pain” imagines her and her lover’s bodies blending with a natural setting, where her body is a marsh, roosting and decaying. Her lover is a Necrotroph, an organism that reproduces on dead cells, and she imagines this person feeding on her body as if it is a dead thing, one coated in soot, and one cutting the heart from a bird. Through these descriptions, it feels as though she is trying to find satisfaction and fully reconcile herself with her chronic pain and its impact on sexual activity, claiming instead of rejecting it.
Her descriptions of herself reimagine and alienate conventional language about the body. In “Cunnus Renatus,” which translates as cunt reborn, her vagina is object-like, “a musical snuffbox with a wind-up key / and ninety-six brass teeth tuned along a grinning comb.” In poem “Francesco del Cossa,” she describes her genitals as necrotic. In “The Erotics of Chronic Pain 3,” she dreams of beasthood, and imagines herself as a wet specimen. She imagines arousal as fickle kinks, volatile, applesaucy and “double stuffed with astonishment.”
Amber Dawn’s work in Buzzkill Clamshell is not only about how language can be used to reimagine bodies, but also about inventing new modalities for thinking about pleasure and self-pleasure. She finalizes her collection with poem “Lez Propheties” that reads like the divinization of the queer orgasm as the poem’s ten sections reveal the hidden power of queer acts. In section V, a two-thousand-year-old dildo is used to ward off evil; in section VII, queers can predict the future by studying soot and ash; in section X, spilt sugar means new love is coming.
In Amber Dawn’s poems, and in her last few lines in particular, queerness in its many appearances becomes grand mythology. Overall, she explores perversion in sexuality with a flourish, leaving readers to readdress desire with new words.
Bios
Meg Collins
Meg Collins (she/they) is a freelance journalist and poet from Ottawa, and temporarily living on unceded Ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people in San Francisco, California. Their work has previously been published in the Dalhousie Gazette, Fathom Literary Journal, Gideon Poetry Review, and Arts Help magazine. Meg is currently working on a series about zines and zine creators in the Bay Area for Arts Help magazine. They think that both poetry and DIY culture allow people to break apart language and reform it to imagine new political and social possibilities.