Buzzkill Clamshell

by Amber Dawn

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 work of poetry, 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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Disability, LGBT, Sex Work, Canada

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 11, 2025

About the author

Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker and performance artist based in Vancouver. She is the author of the novel Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), editor of the Lambda Award-nominated Fist of the Spider Woman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008) and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005). Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, "Girl on Girl," has been screened in eight countries and added to the gender studies curriculum at Concordia University. She has toured three times with the infamous Sex Workers' Art Show in the US. She was voted Xtra! West's Hero of the Year in 2008. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she is the director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian]

Wow. So good. Amber Dawn is really killing it. These are funny, sad, erotic, dark, very queer. Such an abundance of strange images, such generosity in sharing experiences of pain, such clever play with mythology and form.

"At least my cunt / and her cunt / have mutual respect / for each other's sadness."

"Fact: There are more trees on earth than stars in the milky way. / I am alone and searching for a lover made of stardust: Fiction."

OUR SWOLLEN TONGUES BRUNCH IN THE UNDERWORLD

"No. I won't tell you how Persephone takes her eggs. / Everyone is so nosy these days. Leave us to feast / in peace. Leave us to our own private realm of yolk

and white, of spoil and unripe, of force / and weightlessness, of fluency and the inaudible. / I could go on, but these are easy paradoxes. Dull Sunday / kind of paradoxes. The current moment is an unlit labyrinth / at last call on a Friday night and each one of us has lost / cell service and our keys and faith in a certain tomorrow."

[Chase Williams]

Some great writing, but also I often felt like I was reading slam poetry.

[Elena Macdonald]

never have i seen “cunt” so used in poetry, and to that i say: slay.

[Emily Gillespie]

beautiful journey of queer erotics & chronic pain! I had to stop to write a few lines down. I will be re-reading this soon for layers I missed on a first read. favorite line " mentally I'm a warm body being fucked on the neighbour's fresh cut lawn" page 17.

[Madi Haab]

I couldn’t resist that beautiful cover and curious title: it turns out the titular Buzzkill Clamshell refers to the poet’s genitalia after a traumatic medical procedure, and as such a lot of the collection revolves around chronic pain and medical trauma. Despite the heavy subject matter, Dawn constantly does clever, layered things with imagery and language, moving between registers and borrowing from classical and popular culture alike. I found the second half of the collection a little harder to crack, though it was always fun and arresting, and I enjoyed the witchy, feminine, vulgar persona she espouses throughout. The celebration of queerness also made for a very interesting depiction of the queer body not only as a site of pain and trauma but also as one of pleasure and joy.

[Nathalie Kati]

My favourite poems:

19 - Intraoperative Photographs
35 - Bedrest
40 - Unnamed Service Road
45 - Safe Space: A Monosyllabic Rewrite of Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings
68 - Hostile Architecture
100 - Cosmological Touch
101 - Our Swollen Tongues Brunch in the Underworld
110 - Depersonalization Is An Altered State of Identity #3

[Iara Moure]

me gusta las notitas que tiene. es bastante fuerte el ontenido de los poemas y es bastante sororo?
Como que hay una sexualidad que no es sexualizada, como pasa bastante en liibros escritos por hombres (los odio)

[Michelle]

I epically loved this.

[Léa Taranto]

Mythic, searing, and lewdly hilarious, Amber Dawn’s skill and poetic range in this collection leaves me in literary subspace.

[manioł]

4.5/5

[Quinn Venable]

I think this book could connect to many readers on a deep level, I just wasn’t that reader.

[maeve]

unnamed service road, stable in the sky