How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

(Paperback)

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The follow up to Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), Amber Dawn's acclaimed novel about an underground sex society. Lambda Literary Award winner Amber Dawn's sophomore book reveals a poignant and personal landscape - the terrain of sex work, queer identity and survivor pride. This memoir is told in prose and poetry, offering a frank, multifaceted portrait of the author's experience, from hustling the streets of Vancouver in the mid-90s to her present life as an outspoken feminist storyteller.

Reviews

Amber Dawn's voice is heartbreakingly sensitive, yet unabashed. The empowerment and solace she found in the poetry that saved her life is contagious. --GO Magazine

An emotionally difficult but revealing read about the sex industry and the lifestyle of sex workers in which the author encourages more frankness and discussion in the future. --Library Journal

Defiant and proud, Amber Dawn's memoir categorically refuses silence, daring to imagine a better world while offering hopeful testimony for those subsisting in abject spaces its author has since vacated. --Vancouver Sun

Powerful and necessary ... The book's very structure rails against convention and expectation, linking together poems, prose poems, and narrative storytelling to build a cohesive portrait of Dawn's queer identity, her life as a sex worker, an assault survivor, an activist, a writer and an artist. It is tender and biting, gorgeous and courageous, even heroic and, above all, it is hers. --National Post

How Poetry Saved My Life is every bit as forthright as Amber Dawn's novel Sub Rosa, with the bonus of being a subtly pitched call to arms. --The Globe and Mail

Author Bio

Amber Dawn: Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, editor of Fist of the Spider Woman, and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She is also winner of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers' Trust of Canada.