Lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.

The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a four-year period on tour and after losing loved ones and peers to overdose, Dupuis funneled complicated grief into harm reduction advocacy, working to fundraise for and distribute overdose prevention resources in venues internationally.

The slick performativity of pop, punk humor, electronic glitch and sampling, and the surprising leaps of improvisation influence these poems, but beyond music, these poems are informed by Dupuis’s larger concerns about justice and organizing. Cry Perfume is a hopeful but realistic inventory of the virtues and evils that emerge when arts and tech collide. Those dualities are cloaked in the same sparkling fragrance, and there are twinned pleasures and regrets in parting the smokescreen.

Sadie Dupuis is a poet and a multi-instrumentalist. She is the guitarist, lead vocalist, and lyricist for the band Speedy Ortiz. In November 2016 she released a solo album, *Slugger, under the name Sad13.

Author: Sadie Dupuis
Publisher: Black Ocean
Page Count: 112pp
Size: 5.5 x 7.5
Notes: softcover, perfect bound
Date of Publication: October 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1939568625