Conyer Clayton is a writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky currently living in Ottawa, whose award-winning, multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens.

"[Kneeling in Our Name] is a beautiful, thoughtful, insightful, and elegiac collection...grapples with grief so thoroughly and so brazenly and so beautifully that you, like, finish reading it and you realize that you haven’t exhaled since page two. The collection is gorgeous and difficult and thoughtful and it really shows that Clayton is a poetic force to be reckoned with."

—Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press

"The surrealist dreamscape of Conyer Clayton’s latest collection [But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves] 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."

—Emma Rhodes in The Ex-Puritan

"Clayton expresses the trauma of abuse and its lasting impact in viscerally evocative images ... Yet [But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves] 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 Carey in The Toronto Star

"This book surprised me on every page. Conyer Clayton writes prose poems that erupt with emotion, and narratives that swerve beautifully from expectations. In But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves humour is dropped in between surprising images like dynamite, and the world of memory is not as it seems, but as truthful as ever. These poems will slosh around inside your brain, will lap at your heart and will tickle you like the tide coming in, before they overtake you."

—Dina Del Bucchia, Author of You're Gonna Love This

"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 [But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.] remains determined, hell-bent on survival, protection, revenge."

—Dessa Bayrock  in Canthius

"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. [We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite] is a book that resonates."

—Stuart Ross, Author of The Sky is a Sky in the Sky and The Book of Grief and Hamburgers

"Conyer Clayton’s new collection [We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite] reminds me a little of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poetry in its surprising, less-tangible, lyrically-dense, deeply interior images, but also of Ruth Stone’s In The Next Galaxy in its spare structures and short line breaks."
‍
—Chris Banks in The Miramichi Reader

"The poems in this stunning debut construct a world by colliding its sharpest angles. Instead of an orderly pastoral landscape, Clayton gives us “a pasture / with a rusted tractor.” Instead of happily-ever-after, we get “ruins of rock, the frantic mess / we made.” These poems manage to wrench beauty from loss, absence, departure—the various goodbyes that transition us along our individual paths. In [We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite], Clayton’s speaker emerges from the darkness of grief into “the space between / earth and sky,” a realm of generous possibility, where poetry begins."            

—Kiki Petrosino, Author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Hymn for the Black Terrific