We live in a culture that doesn’t know how to talk or think about sex work and sex workers. People who exchange sex for money are portrayed variously as victims of human trafficking, rape, racism, colonial violence and child abuse, as proud heroines who explore terrains of agency and autonomy while providing humane services or as the darkly iconic figures in the misogynist porn fantasies that flicker on a billion late night computer screens.
Sometimes they are portrayed as workers in need of labour solidarity and employment standards protections. It is difficult to know how to begin, and how to sort out the contending versions of truth.
…
This is an important book, full of pungent, sometimes triumphant verse and often troubling images. Anyone who wants to participate in the ongoing policy discussions about sex trade work in Canada and anyone who values honest, well crafted writing should own a copy.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. Read the full review here.
“What subjugates a population more than being criminalized? Having our stories told by outsiders.”
This is the line Amber Dawn stresses as she takes center stage at Skylight Books in LA with fellow editor Justin Ducharme to present Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry. Like all trailblazing firsts, this book has a history.
In 2013, Amber launched How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. At the time, poetry from sex workers was a niche market with a literary canon that could be counted on one hand. Years later, this was still the case. So she and Justin Ducharme took matters into their own hands. The result is the first poetry anthology by self-described sex workers.
Most eventual contributors were already writers or artists, but some of the first people Amber and Justin worked with had never thought of themselves as poets; one of the biggest challenges was convincing them they could be. The work was out there; sex workers were spouting poetry in staff rooms, on Twitter, in ads. And contrary to popular belief, they did not shy away from messiness and vulnerability in their stories. Still, across the publishing world they were more likely to be subjects than writers, and while online communities were vibrant, they were also under constant attack from a slew of censorship laws. Amber and Justin started by holding low-barrier writing workshops, but soon enough word of mouth was pulling in submissions from sex workers around the world, from first-time poets to established artists. It quickly became evident that although the poems ran the gamut between heartwrenching and hilarious, the stories themselves were a powerful force against the counternarratives spun in academia and pop culture.
“Amber Dawn and I would be in the depths of despair and be like…did you read that poem though?” Justin recounts. Hustling Verse represented a pushback, a way of banging the silverware to say I’m at the table too. And after months of work, the first stop in the book tour is Los Angeles, as part of Lambda Lit Fest, the city’s first LGBT+ literary festival.
Local poet Milcah Halili is the first to start the reading portion of the night.
When I’m a seahorse daddy
and my wife’s baby is inside me
I will remember how whores don’t let public mockery stop their glow. Hustlers
with pride keep hustling. Ang anak ko, I’ll tell my child, you come from generations
of hustlers who hustled so that you could be here today.
Be proud, I’ll whisper to my belly.
You are my whole world, mi amor.
You are beloved.
There are maybe forty of us seated in the audience, but applause also comes from listeners tucked between bookshelves and spilling onto counters. Garuda Love sweeps us up in a cadence of rounded vowels and a Southern-gothic drawl. jaye simpson stops twice to giggle over a memory of a handjob during the 2014 Godzilla movie, muttering a hope that the guy never reads this. Doug Upp embodies JLo, warbling out don’t be spooked by the pox on my cock, I’m still cheap thrill erik from the park. Courtney Trouble puts the gig economy on blast for breaking up a community of sex workers in Vegas. Keva I. Lee has the room cackling as she narrates dominatrix work, cracking eggs on clients and getting performance anxiety during a fart scene.
These are only a fraction of the poets featured in Hustling Verse. Fifty-six self-identified sex workers from across North America, Europe, and Asia are featured. Some are retired, some are still hustling. Some talk about grief, some about anger, some about justice. All of them are a different facet to the story that policymakers and social workers and Hollywood never told quite right.
Queer and indigenous voices are at the forefront. With both editors and a number of featured poets hailing from Canada, it is impossible to miss the positioning of sex work in relation to colonialism in the country. Systems of oppression echo, too, in pieces from Pluma Sumaq, who says “this is a poem about reaching past a locked gate, a secured fence, our own closed hearts, and knowing, we cannot stop the songs of migratory birds.” AK Saini describes her first meeting for sex worker activists as “soccer moms and libertarians. I am the only non-white person… I smash a pretty spinach bauble into my mouth, I am starved, I am not yet making enough money to eat consistent.”
But, to quote editor Amber Dawn, “every time a sex worker writes a poem we rise above subjugation.” And this assertion of self is evident throughout Hustling Verse, in lines that weave together pitted streets and dreams and healing.
Hustling Verse continues on tour across North America; with stops at Toronto’s Lula Lounge on October 16, and Vancouver’s Roundhouse Community Centre on November 19.
Last summer, Vancouver-based poet Rita Wong was arrested alongside other environmental activists for blocking access to the Trans Mountain pipeline worksite. She received a 28-day prison sentence this August and was released in early September, having served 18 days. Wong is one of 28 poets featured in Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Toronto-based poet Nyla Matuk. The poems challenge readers “to judge and resist a statecraft that refuses to acknowledge past and present wrongs.” To that end, the timing of Wong’s egregious imprisonment seems sadly fitting.
The book opens with a rigorously intersectional introduction by Matuk. Before outlining her curatorial approach, she discusses subjects like “the paternalistic politics of recognition/multiculturalism,” the centrality of land to the poetics of resistance, and how the Canadian state’s continuing colonization of Turtle Island encourages by extension “the ethno-nationalist Western settler project in Palestine.” Citing Frantz Fanon and the First Nations political scientist Glen Coulthard, Matuk writes that “recognition conferred to the colonized ‘without struggle or conflict’ is not real freedom.” This is not an anthology of cheeky bon mots about the scoundrels in Parliament, nor is it too interested in relitigating the nationalist project of Canadian literature; rather, Resisting Canada questions the integrity of Canadian statehood.
The contributors include a mix of early career and established poets divided into two sections, with Indigenous poets in the first section and non-Indigenous poets in the second. Both sections are varied in their poetic approaches to resistance, and reading the poems out of order also produces fortuitous harmonies. For instance, a private conversation seems to be taking place between Lee Maracle’s “Talking to the Diaspora” and Karen Solie’s “Bitumen,” two longer poems whose attentions linger on the unquantifiable costs and casualties of the pursuit of growth and so-called progress.
The excerpts from Jordan Abel’s Injun collate found texts into an expansive and often impersonal view of the representation of Indigenous peoples. On the surface, Abel’s arrangements have little in common with a poem like Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “Oxford Journal,” whose second-person descriptions of moving through the world are embodied, vivid, and more firmly rooted in the present. However, at their core, both poems are built around a single subject – a self, or a loaded word like “frontier” – that carries so many stories, places, and people within it that it is at risk of rupturing.
While the anticolonial politics of Resisting Canada might raise eyebrows in mainstream Canadian discourse, they are more or less consistent with the most vocal elements in Canadian poetry, particularly the emergent strain expressed in books like Refuse: CanLit in Ruins. What makes Resisting Canada stand out among other recent Canadian poetry anthologies is not simply its editor’s unapologetic polemicism or the defiant spirit of its poems but the way these strands are inextricably integrated.
An equally political but far more populist addition to the poetic canon is Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, edited by Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme. Whereas Resisting Canada foregrounds gestures of resistance present in the contemporary Canadian canon – most of its contributors are critically acclaimed and institutionally fêted – Hustling Verse seeks to shift the focus away from the canon entirely.
Many of the more than 50 poets in Hustling Verse are previously unpublished and, presumably due to the stigma surrounding sex work, pseudonymous. Inclusivity, rather than resistance or a particular view of sex work, seems to be the operating principle. In her foreword, contributor Mercedes Eng points out that “sex work exists on a spectrum.” Though her own experience was with the survival sex trade, she says, “modalities of sex work are many and mutable, as are we sex workers.”
Unlike Resisting Canada, the editors of Hustling Verse do not need to articulate a specific political mandate because the very act of sex workers telling their own stories absent outside mediation is political. Dawn makes a strong case that the inclusion of sex workers in the poetic canon is long overdue: “We’re highly expressive and engaged performers. We embody a dozen personas a night.”
It’s important to bear in mind that Hustling Verse is a poetry anthology by sex workers, meaning not every poem is necessarily about sex work. That said, many of these poems detail sex work in all its excitement and banality, its necessity and contradictions. Highlights include the taut couplets of Arabelle Raphael’s “Gospel” and the breathless prose pieces by Cassandra Blanchard and Natasha Gornik.
Rhanimalz’s poem “Fantasy Breakers” opens with resentment for a mainstream author being applauded for writing “about her intoxicating yet toxic / dalliance” with sex work. The speaker then provides an alternative view of sex work, where “the most titillating part” occurs after the men leave and she calls her best friend to vent: “you know that day when every client is named steve?” While a lot of sex work involves enacting clients’ fantasies, these poems foreground the humanity of the people who attend to others’ desires.
The “for us, by us” ethos behind Hustling Verse, edited by Justin Ducharme and Amber Dawn, demonstrates real flair and depth of feeling. SARAH RACE
Sex workers, insist Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme, need accurate representation. Public discourse leans on narrow ideas. Together, the two have had many conversations on how mainstream media supports toxic portrayals of their cohort.
“Somehow, that particular argument around labour and exploitation and fairness gets heavily laid upon sex workers,” Amber Dawn says. “I just think if people are going to talk about sex work, they need to better learn how to talk about the world, and talk about the systemic barriers that we all face as people trying to survive.”
Certainly, “there are outsiders that have a great critical analysis, but,” the acclaimed author and advocate adds, “they’re still outsiders.”
Over coffee with the Straight in Vancouver’s Chinatown, Amber Dawn and Ducharme are discussing the volume they edited, Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry. Featuring more than 50 contributors from North America, Europe, and Asia, the book offers diverse and nuanced glimpses into the lives of self-identified sex workers, past and present.
The selections span form and content and are the efforts of emerging writers and established names, including Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, and Mercedes Eng. One of the aims here, Ducharme remarks, was to show “varied experience with sex work. We also knew that we were taking poems that weren’t even about sex work, just by sex workers—poems about community, poems about trauma, poems about love.”
The venture grew from talks Amber Dawn and Ducharme, a filmmaker and published poet, had after he shot “Positions”, his 2018 short that drew on his time in the trade. (Amber Dawn chronicled her experiences as a sex worker in her 2013 autobiography, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, which won the City of Vancouver Book Award. Writing in multiple genres in her literary career, she was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for her 2015 collection, Where the words end and my body begins.)
By that point, the two, then colleagues at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, were aware of their respective backgrounds and soon devised an outreach strategy for the project. Contacting community-builders and sex-worker-led organizations in Canada and abroad as part of their call for submissions, they were encouraged by the response. “The utmost important thing to the both of us as editors,” Ducharme says, “was the work that we were getting, that we were being trusted with by this community. It was overwhelming how many people were wanting to take up space in this narrative.”
As Amber Dawn writes in her foreword to Hustling Verse, “Just read the ad copy for our business hustle and you’ll find poetry. Just follow #sexwork on Twitter and you’ll find poetry. Just visit the staff room of a club or parlour or porn studio (well, don’t, actually, unless you work there) and the workers will be spitting poetry.”
The “for us, by us” ethos behind the collaboration eschews sensationalism and demonstrates real flair and depth of feeling. Pluma Sumaq’s “You especially” blazes with imagery and lyricism, describing the larger world as it attests to the regard the narrator holds for peers.
Reflecting the link between environment and labour, Raven Slander’s “West End Sex Workers Memorial” addresses public space and personal history. In “beatitudes”, by kiran anthony foster, a letter from child to parents emphasizes that ignorance about gender has resulted in distance.
“Queerness is very prevalent throughout the book,” Amber Dawn says, “and we didn’t know that would happen. But it turned out that so many of our contributors were somewhere queer-spectrum-identified. Nonnormativity was a very high theme in so many of those poems.”
The transactional aspects of the profession are broached in pieces like Akira the Hustler’s “Excerpts From a Whore Diary”. Kay Kassirer’s “Sex Work Client” discloses the conscious and unconscious forces influencing an escort and the eponymous figure.
Though wit and bawdiness dance through Hustling Verse, as in Keva I Lee’s “Triple F Threat”, perhaps the strongest impression of these pages is of care, whether for oneself or another. “C y n i c i s m” , by Lester Mayers, is a smouldering depiction of a provident high-school student juggling violent johns and homework. Naomi Sayers writes hauntingly, in “A Memory I Need to Talk About”, of a now deceased father who drove his daughter to her job at a strip club so as to avoid her hitchhiking to work.
The anthology, Ducharme notes, “is testament to how brilliant and thought-provoking writing by sex workers is, whether they’re writing about sex work or not. It’s just good poetry. We wanted it to exist so badly, for us and for everyone else that was famished for these types of stories coming from this community—narratives that are controlled by the people they’re about.”
There are plenty of reasons, Amber Dawn observes, why sex workers remain invisible. “And out of all the different types of art forms, to call yourself a poet—there are a lot of barriers to that.
“Poetry is, by some, considered very niche, or a very rarefied art form,” she continues. “So it’s like we’ve brought these two underdog or invisibilized things together, and it absolutely works.”
A book launch for Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetrytakes place on Tuesday (November 19) at the Roundhouse Arts and Recreation Centre. To see details and to register, go to the Vancouver Writers Fest’s website.
Book review: Amber Dawn’s poetry fights back against sex trade stereotypes
“I put it in ink: I write
for other survivors. I am listening
As well, in ink, presently, on this page: I’m here
For the divine and complex work that is healing. “ — Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn, Vancouver-based editor, filmmaker, poet, novelist, and advocate has had a busy and productive decade.
In 2011 she won the Lambda Literary Award, and in 2012 the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. She has edited three books (including Hustling Verse, reviewed in 2019) and authored five more.
She has served as programming director and co-artistic director for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and taught creative writing at Douglas College. Her most recent publication, My Art is Killing Me and other Poems, can be viewed as a companion piece to 2013’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir.
As the contrasting verdicts of the two titles illustrate, Dawn has a fraught and complicated relationship to her life as a writer and public face for sex trade workers.
While poetry may have saved her life, much of the public exposure it has generated has had its painful edges. The new book eloquently explores the dialectical nature of fame, especially when it comes to someone from a marginalized population.
For Dawn, her writing is clearly a cherished act of resistance and assertion, and a way of promoting healing — both personal and social. And yet going public as a sex trade worker, a queer activist and as a poet has left her vulnerable to internet trolling and face-to-face humiliations. As she dryly notes: “Being hated is just part of the job.”
The poems included in this remarkable collection are political in the most profound sense, taking on issues of gender, identity, representation, sex trade work, on-line censorship, debates within feminism and appropriation of voice.
In her sophomore poetry collection, Vancouver’s Amber Dawn explores various dissonances in her personal life and career: her poems address Hollywood, academia, the internet, and the poet’s experiences as a queer femme, former sex worker, and writer. As much of her work does, My Art Is Killing Me explores living as a survivor of trauma: “I put it in ink: I write / for other survivors. I am listening … I’m here / for the divine and complex work that is healing.”
“Hollywood Ending,” Amber Dawn’s poetic examination of some very famous actresses – including Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Taylor, and Meryl Streep – who advocated against Amnesty International’s push to decriminalize sex work, is harrowing. The actresses argue, in part, that such an endeavour could lead to a category of women who are “set apart for consumption by men.” Amber Dawn points out the irony in the fact that those same actresses – all of whom won or were nominated for Oscars for playing sex workers – have not put the same effort into eradicating rampant sexual violence in their own industry.“Tell me,” Amber Dawn writes, “who is being consumed?”
The poet also turns a keen eye toward hypocrisy in CanLit, addressing her time as a student and professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. In “How Hard Feels,” she repeats the refrain “everywhere there is a man,” referring to powerful men’s roles as both cultural gatekeepers and holders of institutional power. Amber Dawn encapsulates the frustration of seeing writing by women – especially queer women – bursting the boundaries of form while simultaneously being belittled as practising “confessional poetry”: “Everywhere there is a woman working her masked craft / invisible labour / ungraspable praxis.”
Amber Dawn explores the lack of respect offered to artists on both a societal and an institutional level. Writing about publicly sharing her experiences as a sex worker and coming out as a queer femme, she decries the fact that once someone shares their experiences, they will be assumed to be always available to speak to those subjects, without any compassion for what such disclosures can cost. Amber Dawn’s poems speak of the extent to which she truly wants to connect with and support fellow survivors but finds herself frustrated by a lack of boundaries and empathy that make this difficult.
The haunting “Touch ≠ Touch Screen” includes what the poet describes as a collage of selections from 71 private Twitter messages about sexual violence Amber Dawn received after publishing her memoir, How Poetry Saved My Life. The gravity of this is palpable, and stark in its juxtaposition of survivors and trolls in the same inbox. In “An Apple, or Haunted,” Amber Dawn explores her complex relationship with some of her family members and shares the vulnerability she experiences in her own writing process. She asks, “When the mind processes trauma through metaphor is it compassion?”
Amber Dawn’s sense of place and style is bewitching. Poems include Catholic iconography, a steel barn in Alabama, museums, and a strip club in Italy. She employs effective use of repetition and line breaks and adds layers of meaning through the clever use of grey-scale on certain blocks of text. “Think about it, sex work is both / invisible and it is a mirror,” she writes. “Hold it up. / Don’t think this isn’t about you.” This is a deeply personal collection that also offers a worthwhile opportunity for readers to evaluate themselves.
Toward the end of My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems, Amber Dawn offers the Poetry 101 course I wish I had been taught in school. “And the wraithy hiss that often visits jaw and ear is poetry./ And the gritty hymns that enchant mending skins are poetry,” she writes. “The feral shade of blue that shows itself at four a.m. is poetry.”
Poetry is visceral and expansive. And for readers of Amber Dawn (the name is a mononym), poetry is an act to speak your truth. Through the various expressions of her poetry, whether hiss or hymn, she names abuses of power in certain spaces and communities. By doing so, she shows us how poetry can witness us speaking out in myriad ways.
In her second collection, Amber Dawn deftly experiments with form and structural devices: repetitions, intentional spacing, a palindrome, and spells. An anagrammatic poem titled “tragic interview” that can be rearranged to form “creative writing.” Poems take the shape of an interview, a redacted email form, a Twitter collage.
She fulminates against the selective solidarity we take part in under the guise of feminism in “Hollywood Ending.” “I think about this a lot –/ what it means to launch an illustrious career playing/ the part of someone you believe is singularly synonymous/ with violence and exploitation,” she writes. “What it means to play the part/ of someone you believe should not legally exist.”
Here, Dawn references that fact that certain actresses both receive nominations for playing sex workers and are staunchly committed to opposing policies that would decriminalize sex work. Meryl Streep, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mira Sorvino are just a few of the names that Amber Dawn cites, but the list is long. Some remain silent on the sexual violence that permeates the Hollywood film industry but are loud voices on the decisions that dictate sex worker rights.
Throughout the collection, Amber Dawn asks, “Who is being consumed?” What weight are we placing on artists when we consume their art and expect their personal narratives to be divulged? What does it mean for writing to be both a cause of suffering and a ritual for healing?
Her memoir, How Poetry Saved My Life, which won the Vancouver Book Award in 2013, tenderly explored Amber Dawn’s life in sex work and activism. Seven years later, she ends her new collection meditating on the consequences of that book, on what poetry can do and where it can take us. “I want poetry that makes me feel like I am/ back on the viewing side of that two way mirror,” she states. Elsewhere, on grief, she writes, “this is how/ my healing took shape/ and this is how poetry/ held its vital language/ out to me.”
She seamlessly weaves together humour with different registers. Italian appears in descriptions of the countryside and fountains, while Old English is melded with writing about sex work. In the opening poem, “The Stopped Clock”, she writes “O striptease stage/ O hallowed ground. […] Face downed belly rolled until I met god/ or a staph infection. Same difference.”
Amber Dawn’s use of spacing is controlled and masterful. Like unwritten breaths, these spaces act as a governing meter. They temper a difficult poem on the world of creative writing degrees and the Canadian literary community. “Everywhere there is a woman queer or fury or holding her beloved body,” she writes.
These are poems with such vivid imagery that I found myself holding my breath at times, seeking an even stiller silence in which to engage with them. Aluminum walls are “poverty gnawed,” and bruises “pull young blood to and fro like the tide.”
Some of the most beguiling poems expose the scaffolding of the writing itself. Amber Dawn intersperses metanarrative markers about what she would like her poetry to accomplish. “I’d like to say something true and complete about compassion,” she writes. Exposing the what of her work never reads as unsteady or self-doubting. These are the sharp words of a writer who knows where she is guiding us.
“Poetry can certainly be narrative,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Town Crier. “And it can also be a meditation. An experiment. A letter. Instructions. A thesis. A manifesto. An experiment. Somatic. A credo. A rupture of the fourth wall. A disruption of the status quo. Oracle. Activism. Speculation. A finding. A collage. A treatise and more.” In My Art Is Killing Me, she has twined and twisted poetry into exactly this; into an exploration of the shapes that poems can embody.
Poetry is the collage of Twitter messages that Amber Dawn received from survivors. It is also a loving dialogue that the poet engages in with the reader. With poems that take on many forms and defy the status quo, the collection seems to say: look, look at what poetry can be. In her poem “touch ≠ touch screen,” she writes “I put it in ink: I write/ for other survivors. I am listening./ As well, in ink, presently, on this page: I’m here/ for the divine and complex work that is healing.” Healing and grief do not exist on linear timelines, nor can they follow a specific set of prescriptions. In some instances, the ink and the page are mediums for processing these boundless states of being.
Stunningly ending the collection with “The Ringing Bell,” she writes “And the ringing bell said hoc est enim corpus meum/ means this is my body/ this is my body/ this is my body.” Long after reading My Art Is Killing Me, Amber Dawn’s resounding words continue to ring and draw us closer to a praxis of healing. To heal the poet, the reader, and “maybe even healing the fallacious world around us,” she writes. In her final 17-page poem, with the repeated mantra “this is my body” echoing throughout, she asks “And how will I claim my body this time?/ And will poetry still help me make this claim?”
Her words remind us that through poetry, we may try to heal, and inhabit our bodies. With this, she reminds the reader that it is a challenging and hopefully healing practice to choose to come to the page again and again.
Alexandra Valahu is a freelance radio producer and writer based in Vancouver, B.C.
Every time I hear that all will be changed now, I think back to the days after September 11, 2001, when Lower Manhattan was enveloped in inches of toxic dust and I was told that never again would audiences stomach an action movie depicting the destruction of New York.
I admit I was tempted for a while to see the world marked before and after coronavirus. Maybe I was more susceptible to the idea because I got sick, though there’s also that feeling in the air that all possibilities are up for grabs. Now I see the pandemic less as a harbinger of the world changed than as an expression of what came before. COVID-19 didn’t invent the conditions at the long-term care home where my blood relative died – a series of Liberal and Conservative governments did. If the world changed on its own, protest wouldn’t be necessary. The world only changes if you change it.
Why does this matter? Because, dear reader, I feel the weight of expectation to explain how a book is still relevant in our new world, even though I have yet to see that world take shape. Pertinent to the book at hand: Among all the brands that have recently rushed to claim not-racist, where is the mass movement for sex workers? And where is the new world for survivors of sexual assault?
Well, if we are being serious that Black lives matter, that Indigenous lives matter, that the lives of people of colour matter, then that estimation of worth has to include a profession of mostly poor, racialized people whose lives are endangered by the Canadian state. And in that regard, Amber Dawn’s fifth book (her eighth, including those she edited), about how violence is inscribed on the bodies of sex workers, then reinscribed on the sex-worker-turned-poet, are, if anything, only more relevant now.
Amber Dawn gently assumes that any reader of this “queer and desperate poetry” has, like her, never lived an uncomplicated story. How to summarize these poems’ many modes and registers, which can go from deeply personal to providing a more distanced overview? A poem can be pointed in its use of repetition, examining a phrase from many angles. But then repetition can also form a mantra, which is a way of returning to the body when we are too much in our mind. I felt safe here even though, underneath it all, there is an adrenalized hum.
It starts with story. In Hollywood Ending, about the actresses who benefit from portraying sex workers but also want to erase them, a series of questions ends: “How does story, and our interpretation of it, determine who we blame and who we protect? How does story decide what we subjugate and what we celebrate?”
Later in the book, Amber Dawn writes, “Lately I’ve been reexamining what it means to write poetry. The thing is I / grew suspicious of the page after I published my memoir.” Consider the title of that memoir, 2013′s How Poetry Saved My Life against this newest book: My Art is Killing Me. She captures that tension, between how art can save but also invite further harm, in these lines from Touch ≠ Touch Screen:
Did your abuse fever teach you to solder belonging and harm?
Were you seen and were you shamed in the same
original place?
Amber Dawn is white and the “I” in her poems is a literary construct representing herself, not anyone else. Still, I think there is something widely applicable about how the writer who makes art from her pain becomes a kind of “paradoxical body,” to use her phrase. It is right to read voices that have been marginalized for so long, but our self-criticism of our reading habits cannot end there. When we read trauma, what are we asking of the artist? And who and what are being consumed?
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In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. Contributors include Amber Dawn, David Demchuk, Hiromi Goto, jaye simpson, Eddy Boudel Tan, Matthew J. Trafford, and Kai Cheng Thom.