We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite

Conyer Clayton

Guernica Editions, Spring 2020

78 pages

Trade Paperback

ISBN13: 9781771835091

ISBN10: 1771835095

English

$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US

Read more from the First Poets Series

In her debut collection of poetry, Conyer Clayton hovers in the ether, grasping wildly for a fleeting sense of certitude. Through experiences with addiction and co-dependence, sex and art, nature and death, she grapples for transcendence while exploring what it means to disengage. What is revealed when you allow yourself to truly feel? What do you ask for to carry you into life, and where do you land when this fails? And when you are finally, beautifully, emptied out, who are you? The poems in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite wonder aloud amidst tangled revelations, and yearn to be lifted away.

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I nearly slipped hard in the rain water, the thick coating of mustard. Just missed disturbing a mosquito nest brimming with potential babies. What kind of father would you have been?

The poems in this stunning debut construct a world by colliding its sharpest angles. Instead of an orderly pastoral landscape, Clayton gives us “a pasture / with a rusted tractor.” Instead of happily-ever-after, we get “ruins of rock, the frantic mess / we made.” These poems manage to wrench beauty from loss, absence, departure— the various goodbyes that transition us along our individual paths. In this book, Clayton’s speaker emerges from the darkness of grief into “the space between / earth and sky,” a realm of generous possibility, where poetry begins.

Kiki Petrosino, Author of Witch Wife and Hymn for the Black Terrific

The poems in Conyer Clayton’s debut full-length poetry book feel haunted, in the way that old fairy tales feel haunted: not by ghosts, but by something uncanny or just out of sight. They’re haunted by the thing Clayton is only just beginning to be able to bear to look at: the possibility of escape.

Dessa Bayrock, for Arc Poetry Magazine

Conyer Clayton’s rich, unpredictable lines are imbued with the transformational traces and scars that humans, nature, and contraptions leave on one another. Vivid sounds and images stagger Plinko-like through these deeply personal poems that display both murmuration and volatility. This is a book that resonates.

Stuart Ross, author of Motel of the Opposable Thumbs and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent

Awards

Ottawa Book Award for English Fiction
ReLit Award for Poetry (shortlisted)

Reviews

Conyer Clayton's We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite
The Temz Review - May 24, 2020
Intimately. Enjambed. Dualities. Conyer Clayton’s We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite
The Anti-Languorous Project - May 1, 2020
We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite by Conyer Clayton
The Miramichi Reader - April 9, 2020

Books by Conyer Clayton

About Guernica

On Monday, April 26th, 1937, the bells of Santa Maria tolled, warning of the inhumane aerial raid that would reduce the Spanish city of Guernica into ruins. Men, women, children and animals were destroyed under the weight of the fiery nationalist bombs...

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