How Poetry Saved My Life Jennifer Zilm Amber Dawn’s second book, sections of which were first published in Room (30:2; 35:4), is a mixed-genre work chronicling the author’s experience in the sex industry and her experience of poetry as a life-changing force. The book attempts to de-stigmatize sex-work, which is still often seen as something “others” do. Dawn’s account, which includes wise reflections on class, queer identity, and the way in which sex-work can change its practitioners, is compulsively readable and nuanced, the readability being a result not only of the subject matter, but also of Dawn’s narrative style, which is conversational and often includes direct address to the reader. Dawn’s book attempts also to de-stigmatize poetry, a genre which is often viewed as being esoteric, inaccessible, or intellectually elite. While Dawn’s prose sections are often excellent, it is her poetry that is of primary interest to me. In the preface, Dawn notes that “only a form as dynamic and fundamentally creative as poetry could provide a medium” for her story. The book is a sustained argument for poetry’s enduring validity and immediacy. Dawn describes reading Kate Braid’s poetry in an SRO-hotel with a fellow sex-trade worker, an event which she says “urged her onward” (14).