top of page

COLLABORATIVE CHAPBOOKS

Chapbooks by VII: VII is seven voices fused into one exquisite corpse: Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson. Based on the belief that seven minds are better than one and that many ideas make joyous chorus, we say: We are I and I is VII. Formed in March 2020, VII is based in Ottawa, Ontario, the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation.

The cover of "holy disorder of being" by VII. The cover features a drawing of a woman with her eyes obscured by clouds.

Gap Riot Press, 2022

The cover of "Towers" by VII. The cover features a dragonfruit against a white background. There are rickety staircases built into the dragonfruit.

Collusion Books, 2020

The cover of "Sprawl | the time it took us to forget" by Manahil Bandukwala and Conyer Clayton. The cover features the outline of a city skyline against what appears to be a leaf, but the leaf is looming over the city as large as a mountain.

Sprawl | the time it took us to forget is a bpNichol shortlisted collaborative chapbook written by Conyer Clayton and Manahil Bandukwala over email in a few weeks in March 2020, published by Collusion Books in December 2020. Orders for a limited 2nd print run can be placed on the Collusion books website. 

​

in January 2021, we released a visual/sonic version of the chapbook, made in collaboration with Nathanael Larochette, Liam Burke, Andy Verboom, and Ruqaiya Quettawala. Find the audio on bandcamp, and the video on youtube.

​

This chapbook is one long suite consisting of poems written alternately by each of us wherein we echo one another's lines, images, and feeling. This is a document of the isolation, longing, anxiety, and loneliness that permeated the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. It is a chapbook of friendship and dreaming.

​

Check out these reviews by Rungh Culture and The Pamphleteer

​

​

SOLO CHAPBOOKS

Conyer Clayton's six chapbooks listed below the photo laid out on a wooden table with their covers all visible.

Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (above/ground press, 2019), cover art by Kelsea Shore. A chapbook of surrealist prose poems inspired by dreams, the precursor to But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. Reviewed by​ The Maynard and periodicities

​

/ (post ghost press, 2019), a micro chapbook.​ From the publisher: "This dream of a poem helplessly interrogates the insolvency of dreams and the violence of gaslighting." (sold out)

​

Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press, 2018), cover art and design and interior illustrations by Manahil Bandukwala. Appeared in audio form on the collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still (2018). One long poem in 5 sections. Severed self, grief, familial trauma; tossed in the pond, evaporates, becomes cloud.

​

Undergrowth (bird buried press, 2018), cover art and interior art by Kelsea Shore. This collection is now available as an audiobook on bandcamp and e-book, both available for free download. Undergrowth consists of 16 prose poems, using the guise of seed packets and botany to explore gender-based violence and self-realization. (sold out)

​

For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press, 2018), cover art by Komi Olaf. A loose crown of sonnets on wilderness and control. Reviewed in Today's Book of Poetry (sold out)

​

The Marshes (& Co Collective, 2017), cover art by Cori Hill. 30 surrealist micro-poems. (sold out)

bottom of page