Cry Perfume

Author: Sadie Dupuis

Publisher: Black Ocean (2022)

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’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

“Cry Perfume is a bouquet of delights, especially rich in the moments where a reader can be a joyful audience to the way Sadie Dupuis makes language malleable, playful, bends it towards the hidden sounds tucked within. 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

“Musician and poet Sadie Dupuis is a rare talent: it's not often we get to witness a visionary innovator in two different fields, just going for it. In Cry Perfume, Dupuis brilliantly stitches her worlds together, creating a new one entirely. It made me cry and it made me laugh and it made me nod along and it made me pause over and over—and importantly, it offered me hope. I feel better knowing she exists, that she's out there on the road, and she's writing everything down.”

–Brandon Stosuy