Amber Tamblyn

Amber Tamblyn is a contributing writer for the Poetry Foundation and the author of three works of poetry, Free Stallion, Bang Ditto, and Dark Sparkler. As an actress, she has been nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and an Independent Spirit award.

From her Q & A with Erin Keane for Salon:

Not to reduce it to this, but [Dark Sparkler] is a whole book of poems about death. I know that a lot of poets struggle with writing about joy, that writing through grief or anger somehow feels more natural to the process. Do you struggle with that also?

I don’t. I’ve never written stuff this dark. My first book was very angry, it was very much a young, budding feminist voice that was angry and had a lot of rage and fire. That voice still exists, it’s just different; the anger is different, the feelings are translated in a different way, transmuted in a different way. My second book, there was a lot more humorous stuff in it and actually I’m already halfway finished with my fourth book, which is probably going to be all erotica and love poems. Those are my favorite type of poems to write. As I said, I don’t choose to do that. I think just because this stuff was so dark for so long, for six years, as soon as the book came out I just started writing. It’s like it was finished and all of a sudden all these love poems were coming to me and I felt like I wanted to write about being alive, and being in love is what that feels like. It’s the antithesis of what this book was in a lot of ways. I think these were harder, these were harder poems...[read on]

Learn about Amber Tamblyn's 6 favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue