Amber Tamblyn

Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library host an evening of poetry and conversation with poet and award-winning actress AMBER TAMBLYN and poet, critic, and Harvard professor STEPHEN BURT. The evening will include readings by Tamblyn and Burt, followed by a discussion of Tamblyn's latest poetry collection, Dark Sparkler.

About Dark Sparkler

The lives of more than twenty-five actresses lost before their time—from Marilyn Monroe to Brittany Murphy—explored in a haunting, provocative new work by an acclaimed poet and actress.

Amber Tamblyn is both an award-winning actress and an acclaimed poet. As such she is deeply fascinated—and intimately familiar—with the toll exacted from young women whose lives are offered in sacrifice as starlets. The stories of these actresses, both famous and obscure-tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this empathic and emotionally charged collection of new poetic work.

Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tomine, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command.

Praise

“Amber Tamblyn’s Dark Sparkler is an elegy, a eulogy, a rhapsody, a rage. In these astonishing poems inspired by dead actresses, Tamblyn fiercely examines the spectacle of the actress as she lives and dies and how our hands and hearts linger on their lives.” —Roxane Gay, author of New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist

“Reviewers may compare Tamblyn to James Franco, who also wrote poems about his own celebrity, but the two cases aren’t really alike: Tamblyn’s work seems less slick, and it’s more playful and far more personal, with highs and lows that stick around after the cameras are off.” —Publishers Weekly

“The poetry collection examines the cost of fame through the lives of some of Hollywood’s most infamous and/or tragically unfamous women in accessibly insightful, and deeply moving, lyrical form.” —Marie Claire