This interview between Margo LaPierre and Amber Dawn originally appeared in the Arc Poetry monthly newsletter for March 2025. Readers can subscribe to the newsletter here.

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Margo LaPierre: Buzzkill Clamshell is your eighth book with Arsenal Pulp Press, and your third collection of poetry, not counting the anthology you edited Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry. What was the editorial process like for Buzzkill Clamshell with your Arsenal editor(s) and how was that process different from your previous collections?  

Amber Dawn: Arsenal Pulp Press supported me to work with an out-of-house editor. Out-of-house editors allow authors to work with mentors or colleagues with whom they are aesthetically and culturally aligned. In my case, I chose Dina Del Bucchia—author of You’re Gonna Love This and other books—because I needed someone experienced with both poetry and humour writing. As much as Buzzkill Clamshell’s focal themes of chronic pain and trauma are just that, a buzzkill, I also consider it a clown of a collection. My previous collections are known for their earnestness and candor. With Buzzkill Clamshell, my aim was to play with pain—to burlesque pain, to satirize pain into a kind of dark erotic nonsense. The thing about nonsense is there are no clear benchmarks on how good the writing is. Was I simply tossing around crude diction and slant rhyme all willy-nilly? Was I going to far? Not far enough? Dina guided me around my own manuscript in ways that were energizing and helpful. Her background in poetry helped with line and image edits, and her comedic skills pushed me to further subvert expectations and let loose. 

ML: If we were to make a game of rock paper scissors out of Buzzkill Clamshell, in which orgasm recurs as a joyous, sacred kind of analgesic, we might say that here it’s orgasm beats pain, pain beats x, and x beats orgasm. How would you define x?  

AD: That’s easy. It’s the void: orgasm beats pain, pain beats the void, and the void beats orgasm. 

The void appears in Buzzkill Clamshell and in my previous collection My Art Is Killing Me, my novel Sodom Road Exit, and likely in other work, too. 

I am of Italian descent, so, I suppose, the void, existential crisis, emptiness, etc. are something of a birthright. Italo Calvino is just one example of Italian writers who use the void as an ongoing motif; to quote Cosmicomics, “I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom.” Personally, I don’t view the void as having a bottom. Though, I will riff off the word “bottom” and say that bottoming—both in the bedroom and the dungeon—are sacred. To bottom is to seek receptivity. To bottom is to negotiate desire in hyperspecificity and to simultaneously invite the unknown. To me, the unknown and the void are interchangeable. 

What’s unique about Buzzkill Clamshell is that it was not written in hindsight. My other books benefited from reflection, healing, and the repossession of my own narrative. Whereas I was managing present and enormous pain while writing Buzzkill Clamshell. 

To manage pain, I summoned the tools being a leather dyke has taught me, in particular transgressing binary views of sensory experience, like pain=bad, ease=good. I simply could not view pain as bad—or else my body would be bad about 80 to 90 percent of the time. I had to submit to the most vulnerable element, that which falls outside of pain and ease, the unknown, the void. Kink has always been a part of my writing practice, but while writing Buzzkill Clamshell I really saw myself as being topped by the void. Readers will be getting a more immediate, kinky and void-esque side of my writing. 

ML: You embrace formal play in this collection: the glosa, a specialty of yours (remembering your glosaful poetry debut Where the Words End and My Body Begins), but also the ghazal, haibun, canzone, barzelletta, viator, villanelle, found poem, and nonsense poem. Which came first, the formal container for each poem, or the content, then shaped into form? Which was the most challenging form to work with and which, the most satisfying? Do you have any advice for poets on deciding how closely to hew to strict formal constraint vs. when to skew a form? 

AD: This piggybacks nicely off the last question, in that throughout Buzzkill Clamshell, form is a conceit—an extended metaphor—for the constrained body. Like some kink activities, say bondage, the forms are constraining, and yet, they are also sensual and exacting and have pushed my craft skill to some interesting edges. 

I wrote a few poems in ancient Italian forms—like a canzone using Dante’s rhyme scheme (abbc deec cffcgg) during the more isolating times of experiencing chronic pain. Rhyme schemes and syllable counting provided a welcome distraction. And it was also oddly comforting to work in forms that are hundreds or thousands of years older than me; it made my pain seems small and insignificant, in a good way. 

ML: I love the line “To endure beyond the empire is poetry, / it’s a lavish axe.” Would you speak to that line’s meaning in the context of our current political moment?  

AD: Underneath all my elaborate fantasies of lust and vengeance, I am not all that imaginative. I’ve never been able to image the possibilities of a society redesigned from a social justice perspective. I have no idea of what might exist in the absence of trauma. Will the empire be toppled? I can’t see it, especially not in this current moment. 

What I know is how to love amidst trauma. I don’t mean coupledom; I’m talking about ferocious collective love—accountability, compassion, reparations, learning, skill sharing, presence, understanding and articulating vulnerability, honest discomfort, holding fast, grit and kindness. I must believe that not having the love beat out of us is to endure beyond the empire.

Axes appear a few times in Buzzkill Clamshell. An axe is a tool, a weapon and a ceremonial object. Axes have been used for millennia. I see those of us who love amidst trauma as axes. Our love does not have a singular purpose—like only loving in a romantic coupling—our love is multifaceted, it’s practical, symbolic, formidable and it is lavish. 

ML: Movies, especially horror movies, abound in this collection. From Nightmare on Elm Street to Poltergeist, Twin Peaks to The Exorcist, Misery to The Dark Crystal, what is it about horror and the haptic that drew you to these kinds of stories and their gory tellings in writing about queer relationships and chronic pain?  

AD: Swan maidens and Hecate-worshiping witches are romantic and all, but I’m a creepy Gen X baby. My divine beings are Freddy Krueger and Laura Palmer. My worldview was also moulded by the queer 90s. The AIDS pandemic had recently (re)demonstrated that normative society would literally watch us die and gaslight us as we were dying. Many queers had no more fucks to give that we were demonized. We felt far more alignment with monsters in horror films than with normative society. The art that came from this decade forever has my heart. Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and Greg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse film trilogy. Catherine Opie’s kink-informed self-portrait photos. The fiendish stage antics of punk band Tribe 8. Jewelle Gomez’s vampire novel The Gilda Stories, Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and the Queer Fear anthologies published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Queer bodies shown in 90s art owed no one palatability or comfort. Horrific, gory, and dark artwork continues to be a way for us to signal to each other. I’d be honoured if Buzzkill Clamshell becomes part of that signalling for anyone whose bodies or existences have been demonized.