Liz Worth is a writer through and through. In a way, she was born to write. It takes a certain type of person to not only examine the world around them, but to look inside and write about how it may look. And to do this—to truly be a writer—you have to have an ounce of honesty in your blood. You have to hold a mirror to this world we live in; and sometimes, you hold this mirror to yourself.

And Worth is as honest as they come. Over a three-year period, she wrote poems that would become Amphetamine Heart. This collection is an examination of Worth’s mental state at the time, as well as her surroundings. And as a lover of punk and metal, she took inspiration from some of her favorite musicians to set her poetry to.

Amphetamine Heart is the mirror. It shows you your low points, and reminds you of how high you can go from the bottom. It is a reminder of how art can literally transform your life for better or for worse—however you let it influence you. It is a collection that allows Worth to be vulnerable, and also strong for allowing her words to be that mirror we so need. Life is living poetry; and you can either take it as something to be shaped, or you can allow yourself to dwell in the empty space.

I was lucky enough to speak with Worth about writing this collection of poetry, as well as her love of music. She provided honest responses, allowing me to gain a deeper understanding of Liz Worth: the writer, the poet, and the visionary.

What got you started writing Amphetamine Heart?

When I was a teenager I used to read and write a lot of poetry, and did so until I was around 19. After that, I sort of put it aside for a while and started focusing on music writing, zines, and freelance journalism—which all led me into my first book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, which I started when I was 24, after I graduated college.

Before then, I’d been really feeling the need to get back into creative writing, but hadn’t allowed myself much time for it throughout my early to mid-20s. When I finished Treat Me Like Dirt at 26, I was so burnt out from interviewing people and researching that I couldn’t imagine ever having another conversation again. I needed to go in a completely different direction. I also needed to listen to my own stories. I’d just spent two intense years documenting other people’s experiences and I’d neglected a lot of personal issues that needed to be tended to.

When I started writing the poems in Amphetamine Heart, I wasn’t consciously starting a new book. I was just playing with words, and trying to articulate a lot of things I hadn’t really talked about yet.

Was this book written all at once? Over the course of several years?

The poems in Amphetamine Heart were written over a three-year period. While some of the collection’s earlier pieces speak to some experiences I’d had from years before, many of them ended up reflecting what I was going through in those three years. For much of that time, I was living in a bad apartment—I used to think I would die in there—and I was in a bad headspace. I was living with situations that were making me unhappy but was very slow to move on them because I just didn’t have the energy, emotionally or physically. I felt like I was collapsing in on myself.

What was your process when writing this book?

I didn’t have any kind of structured process. I would just listen for lines, or words. Ideas or images would bubble up when I’d be walking down the street. I had a lot of trouble sleeping during the time of the Amphetamine Heart poems, and sometimes a line would come to me in a dream and I’d get up and write it down.

Once I committed to writing poetry, the pieces just seemed to come to me. Whenever it felt like a new one was ready to be written I would carve some time out of my day and get to work in a coffee shop or spread my notebook out on my living room floor and start writing.

What about punk speaks to you so deeply?

I don’t think my attraction to punk is far from other people’s stories about what initially drew them to it.

Punk, to me, has always been about doing whatever’s true to you. When I was a teenager, it was empowering because it taught me the importance of self-acceptance. The more I started learning about punk’s roots, the more attracted I was to the diversity that punk’s history held.

I loved that when punk first started, it wasn’t just about one kind of style or sound; it was about self-expression. It was about poetry and performance art and writing and photography and fashion. It was about going beyond the same old boring expectations that were set upon you and making an interesting life.

What types of punk and heavy metal specifically influenced this collection? Were there any bands in particular that seemed to take the foreground?

I’ve always been inspired by punk’s first wave, particularly because it was such a mix of styles and sounds. When punk first started out it wasn’t all about music. The scenes attracted writers, photographers, designers, and poets. The idea that poetry can also be punk has always appealed to me because of that. Patti Smith, Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, and Exene Cervenka are all really interesting to me because they’ve created such striking examples of that.

When I was a teenager, Norway’s black metal scene made its way onto a Spin magazine cover in the mid-‘90s and fascinated me immediately. I’d always been attracted to the occult and when I started learning more about black metal it really appealed to me. I liked that a lot of the lyrics were about haunted forests and supernatural occurrences and evil presences. As cheesy as all that sounds, the music itself was so crushing, so dense. In Amphetamine Heart, there is a certain density, too, but one that I think is more felt than heard. There are spooky forests and dark presences, and there is also a wanting for something more. That wanting is something I thought I sensed in metal when I first got into it.

I don’t listen to so much black metal anymore. I’ll throw some on once in a while but I’ve been sticking more to the sounds of Anvil and Coven and Judas Priest, which all have sounds and themes and images that influenced Amphetamine Heart, too.

Why choose “Amphetamine Heart” as the title poem?

This was one of the earliest poems written within the collection. At the time, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. You know when you can’t fall asleep and you get so frustrated you actually start to have anxiety about not being able to sleep, so you end up being awake for hours? That was how I felt all the time back then, except that I would start to stress about not being able to sleep way before I was even going to bed.

I started drinking every night, to wind down, and then I started combining that with sleeping pills. I wanted to be unconscious. I wanted to have one night without dreaming, or without waking up and tossing around for a while.

What happens when you drink and take sleeping pills together on a regular basis is you end up sleeping, but you’re not rested. You’re just really tired the next day, and you can feel that you’re struggling, mentally and physically. My blood pressure would go up from drinking, and I’d drink a bunch of coffee all day, and my heart would be pounding, pounding, pounding. I could see it through my shirt. I could feel it when I laid down. I called it my amphetamine heart. It felt like the only part of my body that was working as hard as it could. Everything else was tired and run down.

When I was putting together this manuscript I had another title chosen for it, but it didn’t feel right. I thought back to how I felt when I first started all of this writing and realized “Amphetamine Heart” summed it all up.

How do you feel about your mental state post-Amphetamine Heart? Do you feel a sense of relief? Can you finally sleep?

Yes! I can finally sleep. I think my insomnia during the writing of Amphetamine Heart mostly stemmed from a really terrible apartment I was living in at the time. The place felt like a death trap. It was above a store, and there were three apartments upstairs. One of my neighbours had electrical outlets that would spark sometimes. There was a leak in our main hallway and it was going into the light fixture right outside my door. We had a shady landlady who, instead of fixing the leak, told us to just keep the lights off until she could get it figured out. The lights stayed off for a year and a half before anything was fixed.

The walls were thin and for a while there was this older couple next to me who would fight—I’m talking all-out screaming—from five in the morning onwards. On Sundays it would go on for hours, breaking only long enough for them to go to church. There was no way to sleep through it. Every morning started with a blowout and would end with one of them making a trip to the liquor store, which seemed to help quiet things down.

It was a tough place to feel comfortable in. I should have moved way sooner than I did, but I couldn’t get my shit together enough to make it happen. At that time I felt easily overwhelmed, and easily defeated. Even though I hated living there, it was easier to think that it might get better than it was to get myself organized and find another place.

Amphetamine Heart was written while I lived in that apartment, and I think that that environment really shaped a lot of the poems in there because it was also a time when I had a lot of things from my past coming to the surface that I’d tried to dodge for year. Living in such an uncomfortable situation might have pushed me to examine every stressor I was dealing with. Finally, a lot of the feelings and experiences I’d been neglecting had decided they were going to come out once and for all.

I didn’t write these poems as a way to find catharsis, but I do think that was an unexpected outcome of these writings. Actually, I moved a couple months after my manuscript was accepted by Guernica Editions, so there must have been a significant shift in my state of mind to finally feel like it was time.

I feel like now that I’ve finally put myself out there like this, I don’t feel the need to talk about certain things. This book has put distance between me and my past, which is something I wouldn’t have believed was possible before.

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For more information visit LizWorth.com.