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Liz Worth’s debut collection of poems, Amphetamine Heart (Guernica), features a poem called Boozecan. Another mentions "dry heaves." This is a book about late nights and loud music, from the author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond.
   
"Dry heaving is such a common side effect of binge drinking," Worth says. "How many times has it come up in conversations I've had with friends? Countless.
   
"Those words might be seen as atypical for poetry but I wasn't looking to write typical poems," she adds. "These word choices are reflective of real life details. There is a punk rock influence happening throughout Amphetamine Heart, and references of Boozecans and stilettos are reflective of that."
   
Worth lives in Toronto, and her book brings the survivalist tradition in Canadian literature home, as she writes about the dangers of the urban landscape and the destructive allure of self-harm.
   
"I think we all go through moments where we wish we didn't feel a certain way about something, or where we regret something we’ve done to ourselves," she says. "We aren't always as in control of our actions as we would like to think. We do a lot of things to ourselves we don't like, from eating the wrong things to drinking too much to feeding our own insecurities.
   
"There have been a lot of times when I've wanted to get out of my head, or my body, and just make certain things stop."
   
Wright says the poems in Amphetamine Heart come from a specific time in her life, a period when it seemed as if her body was betraying her.
   
"I had a lot of anxiety and nightmares and insomnia, so I started drinking at night to help me sleep," she says. "Then I started throwing sleeping pills into the mix. But my anxiety and insomnia would override the two all the time. When you have that kind of artificial, forced sleep every night you're never truly rested. You're just fuzzy-headed and hungover and you feel even more on edge all day, every day.
   
"My heart used to pound so hard I could feel it all through my mattress at night, and it felt like it was on its own trip, separate from me. It was always pounding and pounding.
   
"If there was one phrase in the book to summarize that time in my life, ‘amphetamine heart’ would be it."
   
Liz Worth reads from Amphetamine Heart as part of Words Allowed at Mondragon on Saturday, Jan. 21 at 8 p.m, with Chandra Mayor, Deborah Schnitzer, Drek Daa, and Courtney Slobogian.