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Amber Dawn: How Poetry Saved My Life A Hustlers Memoir (2013, Arsenal Pulp Press) 4 stars

'A tough life needs a tough language'

4 stars

Amber writes in a slightly fictionalised way of her experiences as a queer sex worker. Without moralism, but also without romanticizing. It alternates poems and autobiographic essays, some with a more activist tone, other really personal and intimate, and this mix enable it steer off from both the preachy and the self-indulgent. The book as a rawness to it that I really enjoyed, and manages to say something that needs repeating in a different way. I don't know what I expected (not this), but I liked it.