Before I go into the questions My Art Is Killing Me inspires, I want to offer a brief comment on why I found ________________’s questions so thoughtful. The first question—about why we expect artists to do our emotional labour—is an incisive one. Typically, I think we have an expectation that reading books is in itself an act of healing, as if healing words will, by osmosis, make things better. That perception seems to undercut the challenging personal work necessary for actual emotional labour; the same goes for quoting e. e. cummings to your beloved. I appreciate the way the question simultaneously elevates the status of artists while undercutting the falsity of their supposed purpose (i.e. in this framing, as opiate of the masses). As for the second question, the idea of consumption and art is a meaningful one—a problem that even (and especially) I succumb to: observing art without being generative or allowing it to truly force me to reshape myself and the world.
These questions prompted others in my reading of Amber Dawn’s poems. One question that sprung to mind for me is what it means to have an oeuvre. In a collection like My Art Is Killing Me, the poems deal directly with sexism, homophobia, sex work, rape, abuse, and so on. It first struck me how many of the poems deal with the same topic; I then considered how many famous poets built their careers on writing about the same topic and whether I am any different. If I can read and write poems about time and find some new nuance to the topic each time, why not for issues of social justice?
Dawn’s approach threads the needle for social justice poems. We should consider the question: what is poetry for? Dawn seems to agitate, never veering so far into the didactic that her work ceases to read like poetry, never so esoteric that it loses sight of the real issues. In fact, the focus of the poems is what gives them their force. One poem is an extended examination of the relationship between Hollywood and sex work. It has the background research to read like an academic paper, but the stylistic arrangement worthy of poetry. Dawn documents how many actresses have won Oscars for portraying sex workers while simultaneously advocating against the decriminalization of sex work (Meryl Streep! A flaw?!). The hypocrisy runs throughout the collection and integrates passages of speeches from film and to the UN. She includes a passage from Mira Sovino’s role in Mighty Aphrodite that just gains profoundly terrible force for its being embedded in the footnotes of the poem: “And so there I am on the first day, on the set, and there’s this guy fucking me from behind, right, and there’s these two huge guys dressed like cops in my mout at the same time and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I like acting’” (40).
Dawn has a special talent for giving those thoughtful, brutal gut-punches. Again, in critiquing the film industry and its role in society from an oft-unconsidered angle, Dawn writes, “I grew up with motives that taught me the meek / shall inherit the prom. Or the Geek shall inherit / access to a blackout drunk cheerleader.” The line break and the internal rhyme just make the line ring that much more powerfully, that much more critically of our social mores.
Some of the lines echo between poems. It’s particularly powerful when there are recurring motifs that build up the characters in the poems. For instance, there are a series of lines that reference a lecherous professor guiding younger female students. The vignettes construct a ‘type’ of person—a stock character common in real life. Within the poem, Dawn acknowledges that he’s a composite and yet he feels so true to life in his toxic horror, both as a systemic and particular figure.
Social justice poems are best when incorporating the personal. Dawn allows her poems to balance both in a way that is emotionally resonant and linguistically sound. There’s a narrative poem about a queer woman taking care of her homophobic relative and tracing the history of abuse and silence in the family. She writes about a letter she received that reads:
e m o o r a l
I like the way Dawn breaks down the misspelling in its particularity and then the descriptive simile of the ‘o’s as infinity symbols, as though she is forever emooral because of her identity as a queer person. I don’t know how true-to-life the account is, but the misspelling is telling. There’s an intimation of being ’unmoored’ in this spelling at the moment of her expulsion from the family. In a line shortly after she recounts how “All my abusers are survivors after all. / Nonno no different”, referring to a family member. I love the repetition of the ‘no’s and how it bridges the disapproval and the family member as though the two are one. The moment is then punctuated with one of Dawn’s particularly poetic images: “My ma told me he died in a trailer so / poverty gnawed she could see the sky // through the aluminium walls.” It’s an evocative image that encapsulates the decrepitude and bleakness of the moment. I have a minor complaint about there not being a hyphen between “poverty” and “gnawed” but I’ll let it slide (along with a few other spelling and punctuation errors in the collection).
In My Art Is Killing Me, Dawn writes that “an anagram for ‘creative writing’ is ‘tragic interview’” (22). The linguistic cleverness may be a bit much, but I can’t help but enjoy it. It also feels appropriate for the confessional tone of the collection (indeed, one poem is a compilation of DMs that people have sent in response to Dawn’s work, often of a triggering or re-traumatizing nature). The headline here is that the collection offers a fine balance of the personal and political.
The collection has an authenticity that is sometimes lacking from similar collections. While I sometimes find myself troubled by the propensity of poets to repeat similar subject matter, I have to give credit to Dawn’s force for her particular set of concerns. Overall, I gotta say: it’s a pretty good book.
Happy reading!
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