Amber Tamblyn is no one-trick pony. The erstwhile Joan of Arcadia star, whose latest film, Stephanie Daley, opens in limited release today, is also a published author. Her first book of collected poems, Free Stallion, was released in 2005, and she’s already hard at work on another, more mature compendium.

“I’ve been writing a lot recently,” says Tamblyn. “It’s a lot of inside-Hollywood anger. I’m telling a lot of dirty stories in a lot of different formats that I think need to be told, and I hope that young girls really enjoy the hell out of it. I think they will, and I think they’ll know exactly who I’m talking about. But it’s a mixture of that, and it’s a mixture of bad relationships. This is much more of a flushing-out than my first book, which was clearly just for me to say, ‘Hey, let me represent myself to you, and here’re the poems I’ve been writing since I was 14 to 21.’ There are some good things in there, I feel like. But there are also a lot of pieces that had a lot of juvenilia, were very young, sophomoric a little bit, which I like, because I wrote them when I was 13. War poetry!”

Here Tamblyn pauses, and offers a self-effacing shrug. “What do I know? So this [book], I think should be interesting. I’ve been doing a pretty deep workshop with a couple of really great poets. One of them is named Derrick Brown and another one named Mindy Nettifee out of Long Beach, California; she has a book called Sleepyhead Assassins, and I think it’s one of the best books of poetry I have ever read from any era. So, we’ve been work-shopping, which has been such a great exercise for me. …Jeffrey McDaniel, who is my favorite poet ever, has a thing where he says, ‘You’ve got to imagine your ass off,’ and I feel like that’s what we’ve been experimenting with in this writing group — really deepening imagery and metaphor and finding things that are cool.”

Another cool thing? Tamblyn already has a great title in the chamber. “I’m thinking of naming it It’s Hard to Face Your Problems when the Problem is Your Face,” she says, with, ironically, a completely straight face. “But, there are a couple names, like Laughs Look Like Upside Down Cries. I don’t even know. It’s in progress.”