WRITER & EDITOR
SOLO CHAPBOOKS
(Gap Riot Press, 2024) - $10
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From the publisher:
Full disclosure: pretty much everyone who had a hand in getting this chapbook into print has cried with and through it. So … content warning: this beautiful, thoughtful, insightful, and elegiac collection hella deals with grief, death, illness, and gender-based violence. But if you’re ready for it, Conyer Clayton’s seventh (!!) solo chapbook, Kneeling in Our Name, grapples with grief so thoroughly and so brazenly and so beautifully that you, like, finish reading it and you realize that you haven’t exhaled since page two. The collection is gorgeous and difficult and thoughtful and it really shows that Clayton is a poetic force to be reckoned with.
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Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook is written by Conyer Clayton and typeset by Dani Spinosa. Cover design by Dani, assembling a collection of handwritten notes, envelopes, letters, and valentines to&from Clayton and their mother. YA IT’S PRETTY FREAKIN’ MOVING WE TOLD YOU
Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (above/ground press, 2019), cover art by Kelsea Shore. A chapbook of surrealist prose poems inspired by dreams, the precursor to But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. Reviewed by​ The Maynard and periodicities
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/ (post ghost press, 2019), a micro chapbook.​ From the publisher: "This dream of a poem helplessly interrogates the insolvency of dreams and the violence of gaslighting." (sold out)
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Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press, 2018), cover art and design and interior illustrations by Manahil Bandukwala. Appeared in audio form on the collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still (2018). One long poem in 5 sections. Severed self, grief, familial trauma; tossed in the pond, evaporates, becomes cloud.
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Undergrowth (bird buried press, 2018), cover art and interior art by Kelsea Shore. This collection is now available as an audiobook on bandcamp and e-book, both available for free download. Undergrowth consists of 16 prose poems, using the guise of seed packets and botany to explore gender-based violence and self-realization. (sold out)
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For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press, 2018), cover art by Komi Olaf. A loose crown of sonnets on wilderness and control. Reviewed in Today's Book of Poetry (sold out)
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The Marshes (& Co Collective, 2017), cover art by Cori Hill. 30 surrealist micro-poems. (sold out)
COLLABORATIVE CHAPBOOKS
Chapbooks by VII: VII is seven voices fused into one exquisite corpse: Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson. Based on the belief that seven minds are better than one and that many ideas make joyous chorus, we say: We are I and I is VII. Formed in March 2020, VII is based in Ottawa, Ontario, the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation.
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Sprawl | the time it took us to forget is a bpNichol shortlisted collaborative chapbook written by Conyer Clayton and Manahil Bandukwala over email in a few weeks in March 2020, published by Collusion Books in December 2020. Orders for a limited 2nd print run can be placed on the Collusion books website.
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in January 2021, we released a visual/sonic version of the chapbook, made in collaboration with Nathanael Larochette, Liam Burke, Andy Verboom, and Ruqaiya Quettawala. Find the audio on bandcamp, and the video on youtube.
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This chapbook is one long suite consisting of poems written alternately by each of us wherein we echo one another's lines, images, and feeling. This is a document of the isolation, longing, anxiety, and loneliness that permeated the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. It is a chapbook of friendship and dreaming.
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Check out these reviews by Rungh Culture and The Pamphleteer
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