Cry Perfume
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musician Dupuis brings creative duality to her playful second collection (after Mouthguard), with peppery one-liners such as "The money's in fiction/ I can handle the truth" and "Be mine but be/ away from me" showcasing her songwriting roots. In five parts, the you the speaker addresses throughout is mourned, loved, and conjured: "writing your name in honey/ on a slip of paper and hiding/ that in a drawer for underwear// how much grief is normal?" In another, she confesses, "It's me, you know me, you know what I'm like/ Me in the sweaty palm of your permanent gripe." The shift from grip to gripe is just one example of how Dupuis transforms well-worn phrases. Instead of files, Dupuis is "dropping my flies/ in your outbox," and instead of amateur hour, in her poem "Amateur Honor," embarrassment is "marked with a streak of beige." Moments of honesty that peek through the wordplay and humor are breathtaking: "White petals circumnavigate the empty seethe." However, cryptic imagery and clever jokes can occasionally distract from the anxious vulnerability and tenderness that glimmer at this collection's core. Still, these pages deliver lively pleasures and searing explorations that are worth revisiting.
