We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite

"Conyer Claytons 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 "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, Claytons 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

Conyer Clayton was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and now happily calls Ottawa home. She has six chapbooks: Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (above/ground press), /(post ghost press) Undergrowth (bird, buried press), Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press), For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press), and The Marshes (& Co Collective, 2017). She released a collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, in August 2018. Her work appears in ARC, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Puddles of Sky Press, and other publications. She won ARC's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, placed third in Prairie Fire's 2017 Poetry Contest, and received honourable mention in The Fiddlehead's 2018 poetry prize. She is a member of the sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor, and writes reviews for Canthius. We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite is her first full-length collection of poems.