Cry Perfume
⤏ SELECT EXCERPTS, “CRY PERFUME” BY SADIE DUPUIS
⤏ OUT OCTOBER 4TH, 2022 ON BLACK OCEAN
Book cover illustrated by Julian Montague | Author photo by Sarah Joyce
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, Sadie 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.
YES TEARS LEFT TO CRY
Peel me off the water
Shallow end lurching
With a nimble stiff
Tell me your favorite bad writers
Tell me about a woman who is
obsessed with if she is
Tell how talking about greatness
makes you less near the great
I follow the detective out to the pool
Against the radius clause
circling over the spot
where the dirt disappears
The skeezy speech of my old rival
sputters out without any say
I’m only men when it rains
“Tell how talking about greatness
makes you less near the great”
— Sadie Dupuis, “Yes Tears Left to Cry,” Cry Perfume (2022)
INFERNAL CATALOG
Woke up with my head propped on a headache
I keep making appointments on the wrong holy day
Trolley tremors enrapture me like a cheat code
I never turn on the train without training tracks
Driving to nostalgic songs, nostalgic for nostalgia years
From across the aisle he screams he doesn’t want to start an altercation
Shake a little steam out, things look grainier now
Green distorted to grey
Knitting and gripped to a government shopping spree
Spent hours on art of primacy before the software crashed
Starry colors hooting at minor maladies
At least you think of me when a song is strange
THANKING THE CLOUDS
My true love sent me love
letters about a famous assault.
“Teamster,” that’s just a perfect word.
Humidity smacks the face
out of rain or fog.
In his too small
brown blazer remembering
icons who wane
in their comfortable chairs
autonomous chimes
in stormless rooms.
BETA BLOCKER
Staving off humility
I suddenly sensed the wraith
behind the shut bedroom.
My esophagus sank
right into my asshole.
What formal message does a ghoul
send standing invisible, flowing
outside the fiction of my quarter?
Jerking under the fuschia disguise of time.
A tomorrow without possibility.
A fatalism I deny under penalty.
Shadow I step in, as it’s mine.
Cry Perfume is out via Black Ocean on October 4th, 2022. It is available for pre-order via these small retailers: