Conyer Clayton
Biography
Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, musician, and arts educator living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. She is the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks, most recently, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot Press, 2022) written collaboratively with VII, a poetry collective of which she is a member. Her collaborative chapbook with Manahil Bandukwala was shortlisted for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award, and she is the winner of the 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize and the 2017 Diana Brebner Prize. Her poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Room Magazine, filling station, Best Canadian Poetry 2022, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review and others. www.conyerclayton.com
Poetics Statement
“My poetics is very centered in the body and the various ways our experience runs through it. I consider grief, specifically the death of my mother, quite often in my work. Her loss is a thread that runs through all of my chapbooks, my album, and both of my books. I think a lot of how trauma resides within, shifts, and impacts the body throughout time, CPTSD, and familial trauma, especially as it interweaves with loss and grief. My second book, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, deals with CPTSD and trauma through the scope of surrealism and dreamscapes. I often use fantastical and surreal elements as a grounding tool for painful or questioned memories, for that which cannot be safely stated. I deal with issues of substance use, recovery, and sex — all of these bodily experiences are very present in my first book We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, and in newer works. In my current projects, I am grappling more directly with disability, chronic pain, and the climate crisis. How can we survive, thrive, and what impact does all of this have on our embodied, daily experiences? While the focus of my writing shifts, the body is never removed from the equation. It is both the source and the relief from pain, where all our experience begins and ends, where we hurt and also where we, hopefully, heal.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Seeds
I pray to catch on fire,
to get caught up
in a mercifully
lightening storm,
burn my body back
to earth. The woods
are overcrowded. Stillness
lost, boardrooms and clearings.
We competed for the sun,
reaching out for the last
solar flare, arcing slowly
over you lying still on the couch.
Mortgage research and persistent fungi.
Abortions whispered
into rotting logs and deer hooves.
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?
Winner of Arc Poetry Magazine's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, Published in Arc Poetry Magazine's Summer 2018 and Spring 2022 Issues, and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020)
Self-made
Published in But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022)
One year into dating you
I started
filing my nails.
What does it say
that before us
I chewed
my own
body
apart?
*Published in Big Smoke Poetry