We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite is collection of 48 poems, divided into 3 sections of 16 poems each. It is about the development of identity in your early adulthood. What do you let define you? What do you retain, and what do you let go of? It is about seeking answers in other people, unhealthy relationships, in sex, in booze, in weed, in art, in nature. Perhaps most successfully, in nature. In this collection, I seek to reflect the shaky grounds we all navigate while attempting to craft ourselves. The ethereal feeling of grasping for certitude in all the wrong (but hopefully at some point, right) places. The fog of experimenting with yourself. The haze of your early twenties. The insistent return of the desire for transcendence, and the constant dismissal of it in favour of material coping mechanisms.

Conyer Clayton was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and now happily calls Ottawa home. She has six chapbooks: Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (above/ground press), /(post ghost press) Undergrowth (bird, buried press), Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press), For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press), and The Marshes (& Co Collective, 2017). She released a collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, in August 2018. Her work appears in ARC, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Puddles of Sky Press, and other publications. She won ARC's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, placed third in Prairie Fire's 2017 Poetry Contest, and received honourable mention in The Fiddlehead's 2018 poetry prize. She is a member of the sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor, and writes reviews for Canthius. We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite is her first full-length collection of poems.