Amber DawnRecensioni

FYI Review - This anthology contains the following short stories:
-What Are You Afraid Of? by Amber Dawn
-Slug by Megan Milks
-Postulation on the Violent Works of the Maquis de Sade by Elizabeth Bachinsky
-Further Postulation on the Vilent Works of the Maquis de Sade by Elizabeth Bachinsky
-Conspiracy of Fuckers by Nomy Lamm
-Every Dark Desire by Fiona Zedde
-Homeland by Kristyn Dunnion
-In Circles by Aurelia T. Evans
-Your Stockholm Syndrome by Esther Mazakian
-nascent fashion by Larissa Lai
-Sido by Suki Lee
-Crabby by Michelle Tea
-in your arms forever by Courtney Trouble
-Shark by Kestrel Barnes
-All You Can Be by Mette Bach
-Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental in East Vancouver by Amber Dawn
-Fear of Dyin to the Wrong Song by Amanda Lamarche

If one of Michelle Tea's San Francisco novels met Wlliam Vollmann's The Royal Family in a dive-bar bathroom, engaged in a hazy, drug-fueled hook-up neither remembered the next day but both felt pretty good about, and got pregnant, the resulting child/novel would be Sub Rosa. It's dark, funny, skeezy, feminist, gross, beautiful, smart, dream-like yet absolutely true. Our narrator begins the book couch surfing in exchange for handjobs & from there, well, things can only get different. She finds happiness in Sub Rosa, a magical part of San Francisco. If Snow White or Cinderella ever turned tricks, they wouldn't survive an instant in Sub Rosa, but I bet half of Sub Rosa's inhabitants think they're fairy tale princesses and in Sub Rosa they kind of are.

But beware: there's a desperation to this delight, as in Tea's novels, as in Vollmann's. Sub Rosa is a fantasy about what happens to "all the beautiful lost children" (235), of whatever age, who go missing, never to be found. They're not dead or exploited, they're joyfully in Sub Rosa with only the looming Dark to remind them of what could be. I loved reading this, hated for it to end, but it gave me nightmares that had me waking up my dogs.½

Just really incredible, beautiful poetry--the form made me feel sort of grounded, and there are so many lines that are so beautiful--Amber Dawn does an amazing job of weaving the lines she's used in between her own work in just really remarkable and awesome ways. If you, like me, are a person who feels like you struggle to read poetry, I think this really helped me feel like I understood how to approach the poems in ways I normally don't. Even if you feel more at home in poetry, though, you should read this.

Really beautiful and deeply generous. Dawn's poetry is cutting and tender at the same time, and the prose pieces here are really beautiful and invite the reader to sit with her (in some cases literally!) The movement across these aspects and times of her life give a good arc while also really just settling in with what it means to be older than you ever thought you would be, and what that can look like. The last piece about her wife was a really incredible and tender one to end on, and I'm really grateful to read it from where I'm sitting now. Just lovely.

This book has so much--I just finished it and I feel sort of drained and drawn out, in a good way. The love in it is really palpable, and the horror aspects are just gut-wrenching and beautiful and hard to sit with--not in a graphic way, just in a 'gets into your bones' way. This is one of those books where I wish I had more to say that was convincing, but I loved it. It took me a second to get into it (it kind of throws you in the middle at the beginning and then reels back, and that is hard for me) but by the end it's just so much and so tender. Every character in it is just so complex and I love all of them, and the questions Starla asks about that love, as she's trying to heal and is also being hurt, are so, so... much and so important to me right now.

This book is one of the best I've read. Stories range from skin-crawling creepiness to weird horror. I liked how it didn't resort to traditional horror tropes. On the whole, the book was imaginative and scary. My favorites were "Shark", "Conspiracy of Fuckers", "Homeland", and "Sido". There were a few stories that were kind of snoozers, but the good stories more than make up for it. Highly recommended.

"My terror is terror's ubiquity."

(Trigger warning for rape. Also, some of the individual story descriptions may contain vague spoilers. Read at your own risk!)

In Fist of the Spider Woman, fifteen daring authors frankly ask themselves, "What am I afraid of?" The aim is not to quell our fears, but to embrace them. In doing so, their work takes on an entirely different form than the familiar thrills of contemporary Hollywood horror films.

Between the blurbs on the back cover and the wonderfully creepy artwork (by Julie Morstad) gracing its front, Fist of the Spider Woman is not at all what I expected. For starters, most of the stories aren't particularly scary. With a few notable exceptions, you won't find many supernatural baddies or serial slashers here. The fears explored within these pages tend towards the mundane as opposed to the otherworldly: Carrying on after the death of a loved one. Embracing vulnerability by learning to trust others. Accepting help. Being caught by karma. Our culture of fear. All of which is sprinkled with a liberal helping of sex. In fact, many of the stories in Fist read like erotica over horror (e.g., "Every Dark Desire" - vampire dominatrix porn; "Slug" - worm porn; "In Your Arms Forever" - ghost porn).

Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just not what I thought I was getting when I picked this anthology up. (Though I must admit that many of the rape scenes turned my stomach; not for the mere presence of rape, which is disturbing enough on its own, but because the victims often come to enjoy their non-consensual abuse.)

Instead of singling out those pieces I didn't enjoy (looking back on my notes, I assigned a 2-star or lower rating to 5/14 of the stories and poems), I'd rather rave about the ones I loved.

Editor Amber Dawn's contribution, "Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental in East Vancouver," might be my favorite of the bunch. It's a surprisingly poignant tale about the last of the "legendary queer houses" in Vancouver. Set to be purchased by (presumably) a pair of yuppies, the current tenants are enjoying one last night of bondage in the historic home when the spirit of one of the previous owners - possibly the home's very first lesbian occupant - is conjured to come out and play by her long-suffering lover. It's a commentary on gentrification wrapped up in leather and lace. And, yes, a spectral rape scene.

Aurelia T. Evans's "In Circles" = Supernatural (specifically, the Season 1 episode "Wendigo") meets Middlesex (I think. It's in my TBR pile.) A ridiculously patient Bloody Mary returns decades after she's been summoned to claim girls who are "different" - in Kate's case, intersex. This is one of the few stories that pulled off the sexy-meets-scary vibe quite well.

"Crabby," by Michelle Tea. If cleanliness is Godliness, then what is pubic lice?

In "Shark," Kestral Barnes teases out the different faces that "monsters" can assume. The narrator's mother, a marine biologist, studied white tipped sharks in her "backyard ocean"; and, when the dock collapsed one fateful night, she lost her life to one of her subjects. Years later, her "dad" Baba was also - almost - taken my a shark woman named Brooke. This story plays into the "gold digger" stereotype, but I kind of enjoyed it anyway.

Meanwhile, Mette Bach's "All You Can Be" stars a sadistic psychiatrist who will stop at nothing to have (read: possess, control, own) the woman of her dreams. The psychological creep factor is strong in this one.

I'm not really big on poetry, so I was surprised to find myself savoring Elizabeth Bachinsky's "Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade." To wit: "it's a strange appropriation to finance a woman's hatred" and "my terror is terror's ubiquity."

Last but by no means least is "Homeland" (Kristyn Dunnion), in which a jaded punk picks the wrong "Lesbian Zombie" to con.

Fist is a pretty mixed bag: I quite loved some of the stories, while a large number fell flat for me. Despite the 3.5 star rating (rounded down to 3 where necessary), I think it's well worth a read for some of the shinier pieces.

The collection is also quite diverse: nearly all of the stories feature lesbian protagonists, and there are also intersex, transgender, genderqueer, and disabled women (and a few men) characters.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2015/01/12/fist-of-the-spider-woman-edited-by-amber-da...½

I debated whether or not to use a really tired cliché when I sat down to write this review of Vancouver writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn’s recently released memoir, How Poetry Saved My Life. In the spirit of a writer who’s not afraid to title two of her poems “What’s My Mother F***ing Name” and “Hey F*** Face,” I then thought ‘fuck it,’ I’m going to say it anyway: this book made me laugh and it made me cry. I mean this in the best and the most sincere way. Let me tell you why.

There’s a certain messiness and refusal to be contained that this book, subtitled A Hustler’s Memoir, celebrates and shouts from the rooftops...

See the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/and-yes-poetry-must-b...

Gorgeous, twisted, and erotic: it’s a strange but tantalizing combination that is the collection Fist of the Spider Woman. Edited by the ever-fabulous Vancouver-based writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn, this book of “tales of fear and queer desire” is probably the most unique anthology I’ve ever read. It’s queer not just in the LGBTQ sense, but also in that older, more fundamental meaning: strange, odd, unsettling. With over half of the contributors hailing from Canada (nine out of fifteen), the book also represents a diverse group of queer Canadian women writers, who impressed me to no end about how far their imaginations could venture, both in the direction of the terrifying and the erotic. Actually, probably the most remarkable thing about this collection is how all of its contributors show that travel toward that which is frightening and that which is sexy just might be in the same direction....

See the rest of my review at my website: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/gorgeous-twisted-and-...½

Vancouver writer Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa, published in 2010 by the radical and remarkable publishing house Arsenal Pulp Press, is a fantasy novel that is both familiar and fantastic. It deals with (what should be) a recognized reality in its depiction of gutsy, gritty, strong women doing sex work in Vancouver’s East end. But Dawn—a writer gutsy, gritty, and strong like her characters—has imagined a world that is a glittery yet tough fable twist on the story of a teenage runaway turned sex worker...

Check out the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/hello-world/½

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

For the record, I want it noted that I wanted very much to like Amber Dawn's Sub Rosa; it not only comes recommended by my old '90s writing buddy Michelle Tea, but Daniel Casey even asked to re-run my resulting write-up at his Gently Read Literature, a great litmag that I love having the chance to support. Ah, but then I actually read the book, and realized that it's an only so-so academic/transgressive radical-feminist fairytale, much in the style of Kathy Acker or Lynn Breedlove but not with any of their verve, wit or exuberance for life. Although I wouldn't call it actively bad, I unfortunately find myself with not much to say after reading it besides, "Oh, ho-hum, another one of those books, I see;" and that's a shame, given its pedigree and people's interest. It comes just slightly recommended today.

Out of 10: 7.1