Review of My Art Is Killing Me by Amber Dawn // Margaryta Golovchenko
Trigger warning for readers: this review includes discussions of sexual assault and rape.
In her forward to this collection, Doretta Lau writes: “Amber Dawn has taken care to provide safety so that we may choose to engage with these poems, which delve into her personal history to examine what has forged her as an artist.” I read most of Dawn’s new poetry collection My Art Is Killing Me on my subway commute to and from university. When you’re on public transit, you’re out in the open, in public space, but Dawn’s poems created the kind of charged yet protective space described by Lau. This was the space in which I received Dawn’s poems, which often caused me to suck in a sharp breath or put the book down and dwell on the complex emotions the words on the page elicited in me.
Openness is what characterizes My Art Is Killing Me. Dawn exposes much of her past experiences, from her past as a sex worker to her time in the creative writing MFA at UBC to her queer femme identity. Open herself, openness is also what Dawn strives to elicit in us. The poems in My Art Is Killing Me challenge our prejudices and preconceptions—particularly of sex work, as “[t]here are no reports on how many times sex workers have prevented rape”—as well as our inaction when it comes to listening and supporting survivors of sexual abuse, until the outcome becomes the realization, an “early lesson about story [that teaches] that [one’s] own personal narrative is very cheap.” In long poems that contain elements of prose and narrative, we see an inversion of the familiar expression “out of touch with reality.” Instead, Dawn highlights how outmoded our collective reality is, and how dangerous it is to be enamoured with a perception of reality that suits the easy and dominant narratives of economy, celebrity, and academia.
There is no separation between the poet as an individual and the poet as their craft in My Art Is Killing Me, as Dawn herself points out that “[a]n anagram for ‘creative writing’ is ‘tragic interview.’” Dawn’s collection is part ars poetica, part memoir, and all feminist critique. The vulnerability of her poems is like a challenge to a staring contest against the heart of a painful truth. This relationship between the personal and the creative, Dawn’s advocacy for sex workers and her writing career, is most palpable in the gut-wrenching poem “Dear IncorrectName,” which shows just how thin the boundary is between these two seemingly separate categories, particularly when it comes to the way we treat writers and other artists and what we have come to expect from them. If at first it’s easy or even instinctive to chuckle at Dawn’s sharp wit in her redacted versions of emails and wondering who would ever think to write something like “we are Studying Othering the Living Hell Out of Prostitution in Canada […] and other topics related to your ‘hellish existence’,” the persistence of this rhetoric in the lines that follow is a reminder of how far we still have to go.
The central question My Art Is Killing Me concerns itself with is reception. Who gets to tell the stories and who listens to them? More importantly, why do we tell certain stories the way we do, and why has this become the accepted standard? In this regard I loved a couple of lines in the poem “Fountainhead,” in which the speaker asks us: “Imagine if the grounds we walk were built from queer love? What song / would our queer scion sing six thousand years from now? What shape / would story take?” In fact, Dawn often asks the reader to listen, negotiating the “you” of the reader, their presence and voyeuristic form of looking. By reading and acknowledging stories that are not one’s own, you have the responsibility to carry forward this new knowledge for yourself and for others.
I acknowledge that I write this review from a place of privilege no different from that described by Dawn herself when she writes of “[t]he whiteness that tipped me the script/ and the whiteness that ensured I was heard.” It is Dawn who reminds me several poems later that “A poem is always a mirror / that we must hold up before us / but catch that education / elsewhere.” I limit my contribution to the conversation by saying I hope that everyone picks up My Art Is Killing Me and, to paraphrase Nietzsche, stares into the face of the abyss for themselves, because Amber Dawn’s new collection is a five-alarm, fly-out-of-bed-because-you’re-late wake-up call, and we have all long overslept.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.
