Conyer's third full-length poetry collection, the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn), releases October 2026. Preorder now through Wolsak and Wynn, or your local Canadian or US bookseller.
Their novel-in-progress has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, a McCormack Writing Center Scholarship (formerly Tin House), and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Ottawa.
They are the author of two previous full-length poetry collections: But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of The Archibald Lampman Award, A Feed Dog Book, Anvil Press) and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award, Guernica Editions).
Their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, The Ex-Puritan, This Magazine, Room Magazine, filling station, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.
"the lake-shaped excuse is brilliant and painful. Conyer Clayton takes us deep into grief’s interior, where a mother’s absence becomes a vital presence, carried not only in memory but invoice and body—'my head is her head and / her aura mine.’ Tender yet unflinching, these poems grapple with illness, addiction, violence, and regret.Yet they return, again and again, to the daily practice of loving—through acts of imagination, friendship, nature, and sobriety—because ultimately ‘connection/ is the window / of wanting I want / to look through / the lake I want // to stand in.'"
—Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You
"In striking lines that repeat and mirror in fractals, these poems tease out memory like a prayer, capturing the pain and claustrophobia of sudden loss: ‘My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.’ From the book’s meditative opening, Clayton beautifully voices an embodied experience of grief and its visceral pleading: ‘I already / have every memory of / you I ever will.’ What a gift to encounter a book that recognize show the death of a mother gnaws from within—and to be guided so tenderly through its testimony of love.”
—Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress
"The hauntingly beautiful poems in Conyer Clayton’s the lake-shaped excuse are appropriately ripple-like in their transmutational, incantatory quality. Echoes of the speaker’s mother’s voice resound and are made new through the speaker’s own voice, resulting in a kind of blood harmony utterly unique to genetic passage. The mother and the speaker are not the same person, but in many ways, of course they are, such is “the terrible unity of wanting.” These poems want against absence, they reach for what is no longer there... but still they reach anyway. This body of work, like a body of water,refuses stagnation — this is a project born of an ever-expanding love that gives life to grief and asks, “What if / (another expanding tear) / But how,”in the same paradoxical breath. There is real music behind these quiet devotions, and we’re warmly, generously invited to listen closely. May we all learn to practice patience and grace in the face of grief, connection in the face of loss. May we trust in what lies beyond ourselves. “Pray. Then / start again.
—Chelsea Harlan, author of Bright Shade
"...Clayton is a poetic force to be reckoned with."
—Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press on "Kneeling in Our Name"
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 in 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."
"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 in 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."
Reviewed in the temz review and The Miramichi Reader
"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 The Sky is a Sky in the Sky and The Book of Grief and Hamburgers
"Clayton's words hang in the middle-space between overt meaning and open interpretation, allowing the reader to not just see but feel every moment of delicate, raw vulnerability throughout their work."
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