Buzzkill Clamshell
by Amber Dawn
Arsenal Pulp Press
128 pages
$20
Amber Dawn’s third poetry collection, Buzzkill Clamshell, is a raw and hypnotic excavation of queer desire, memory, and chronic pain. Lush with bodily imagery and shifting temporalities, the collection moves like a spell—each poem a conjuration, an incantation of survival, longing, and reclamation. Readers familiar with Dawn’s work will recognize her ability to layer tenderness with sharp, visceral intensity, crafting a poetic landscape that is at once intimate and mythic.
The collection unfurls like a dream in a haze of wonder and warning, stitching together moments of queer intimacy and self-reckoning, grounding them in elemental imagery—flesh, blood, earth, and bone. In the lines “If I cut out the heart of a sparrow and hold it under / my tongue, then I will understand the language of birds,” Dawn depicts a ritualistic devotion to knowledge and transformation. The speaker’s desire to inhabit a new linguistic plane through an act both violent and reverent speaks to the broader themes of metamorphosis and sacrifice that linger through the collection.
Dawn’s poetics shine in her ability to intertwine the erotic with the eerie. In “Bedrest,” she writes: “Moons / ago I wore a constant bruise below my clavicle bone / where my lover bit down as I fucked her. The bruise radiated rough heat to coax me awake / in the middle of the night, which seemed so very romantic. In retrospect, / it might have been / a hematoma.” This passage exemplifies Dawn’s knack for complicating desire—how love and pain intertwine in ways both intoxicating and disquieting. The humour tucked into the hindsight of “it might have been / a hematoma” reflects a sharp self-awareness, adding a layer of wry, almost rueful, retrospection to the poem’s intimacy.
Dawn’s ecological metaphors also deepen the collection’s exploration of longing and impermanence. “I want her to love me like termites / love a nurse log. I want her like a felled tree wants to turn back into soil,” she writes in “The Erotics of Chronic Pain #2,” drawing a parallel between queer desire and natural decay. Love, in Buzzkill Clamshell, is something that consumes, repurposes, and ultimately returns to the earth. This connection to the organic—the way the collection pulses with imagery of decomposition, rebirth, and interspecies entanglement—reinforces Dawn’s vision of love and identity as ever-evolving and deeply embedded in the cyclical processes of nature.
With Buzzkill Clamshell, Amber Dawn continues to push the boundaries of queer poetics, offering a collection that is both feral and tender. The poems here demand to be felt in the body as much as read on the page. This collection lingers—like a bruise, an incantation, a lover’s touch.
