WRITER & EDITOR
WINNER of the Archibald Lampman Award!
Longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets
Longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry
The narrator of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. weaves through aquatic landscapes—water parks, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans—reverting to childhood and back, foreshadowing the inevitable with a calm born of accepting the absurd. Conyer Clayton's poems, explore how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those of abuse and assault, and the way we forget—or obsess over forgetting—memories of those who’ve died. These poems validate dreams and all internal experience as authentic … even when we don’t know it.
Reviewed in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Toronto Star, Canthius, The Ex-Puritan, periodicities, The Ampersand Review, and The Temz Review
"...But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. is a powerful testimony of survivorship. Set in a surreal and dreamy landscape, these poems overflow with raw emotion and wash away expectations."
—Meaghan Flokstra in The Ampersand Review
"... [an] exemplary collection of surreal prose poems."
—Elena Bentley, Arc Poetry Magazine
"From beginning to end, Clayton’s dream world remains kaleidoscopic, as ominous and cheerful as a circus or a surrealist painting. Still, the speaker in the poems remains determined, hell-bent on survival, protection, revenge."
—Dessa Bayrock, Canthius
"Clayton expresses the trauma of abuse and its lasting impact in viscerally evocative images ...Yet this isn’t a grim book, partly because the scenarios often feature weird, funny details ... but also because the speaker in these nightmarish situations actively seeks a way out."
—Barb Casey, The Toronto Star
"The surrealist dreamscape of Conyer Clayton’s latest collection provides one of the most honest and visceral depictions of living and slowly healing from CPTSD that I have ever read ... a testament to intentional and persistent survival.”
—Emma Rhodes, The Puritan
WINNER of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry
Purchase available from Guernica Editions and your local bookseller, or wherever you buy your books!
Audiobook available on Audible and Apple Books.
In their 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, they grapple 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.
Reviewed in the print edition of Arc Poetry Magazine Issue 92, The Miramichi Reader, The Temz Review, The Anti-Languorous Project, and periodicities.
“We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite is a poetry collection that truly values its reader’s time and ear. Every page brims with the sort of insight and restraint that most debut collections only give brief flickers of.”
—Jury for 2021 Ottawa Book Awards: Ben Ladouceur, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Ian Roy
"The poems in this stunning debut construct a world by colliding its sharpest angles. These poems manage to wrench beauty from loss, absence, departure—the various goodbyes that transition us along our individual paths."
—Kiki Petrosino, Author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Bright
"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, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, and The Book of Grief and Hamburgers