Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis

from Speedy Ortiz

Book/Magazine

Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis
Out October 4, 2022 via Black Ocean/Chapter House Publishing Group
Paperback / 124p. / Poetry

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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.

“Cry Perfume is a bouquet of delights. Especially rich in the images, in the scenes that make you feel like you have lived them, and cannot wait to live them again. This is a book of immense pleasure, and I am so thankful for it.”
— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America

“Sadie’s poems have all day long sustain. Musical meters and flows cut with DIY realness—it’s so fresh and I’m really into it!”
— Stephen Malkmus, of Pavement and The Jicks

“Sadie Dupuis’s poems upset the sacred order—a lot, pulling a rabbit out of a hat and acting like she knows it in a familiar but noir kind of way. It’s impressive. I don’t mean Sadie is god, but she is definitely one of their friends.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

“Musician and poet Sadie Dupuis is a rare talent. I feel better knowing she exists, that she’s out there on the road, and she’s writing everything down.”
— Brandon Stosuy, founder of The Creative Independent and author of Make Time for Creativity

“Cry Perfume bursts with an absolutely hallowed strangeness that I love, a logic and surreal pleasure all its own, wonderful and new. These poems are small, potent, full of textured acrobatic language, funny to a knife’s point ... Essential.”
— Wendy Xu, author of The Past, You Are Not Dead

“In Cry Perfume, being alive is not the same thing as really living. These poems stare up at the moon at night and go to their day jobs the next morning. They give us much needed tinctures and balms to soothe the nervous system on this endless galactic journey.”
— Jenny Zhang, author of My Baby First Birthday