Buzzkill Clamshell

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 it.

'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

'Ribald and unrepentant, in turns ferocious and tender, the poems in Buzzkill Clamshell showcase Amber Dawn'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. Resilience has never looked quite so sexy or so sacred.' Kai Cheng Thom, author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human