Author Talk with Sadie Dupuis + a reading with local author Lisa Ganser
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Advance praise for Cry Perfume:
"A bouquet of delights … this is a book of immense pleasure, and I am so thankful for it."
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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!”
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Stephen Malkmus of Pavement and The Jicks
"Dupuis’ 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."
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Eileen Myles, author of Not Me, Chelsea Girls
Prolific musician and poet Sadie Dupuis announces her second book, Cry Perfume. Though she relocated to Philadelphia in 2016, Dupuis had never been there for more than two consecutive weeks, thanks to near-permanent touring—until 2020 forced a hiatus from travel. Over the course of that year and the next at home, Dupuis compiled and edited four years’ worth of poems she’d written on the road. The result is Cry Perfume: a stunning new collection of poetry about beauty, mourning and music. Cry Perfume, which will be out on October 4 via Black Ocean, is the follow-up to her 2018 debut poetry collection, Mouthguard, which earned universal praise. Rolling Stone called it “an affecting work of literature,” while Marie Claire noted “the poems in Mouthguard get under your skin and stay there.”
Over the past decade, Sadie Dupuis’ electrically dynamic guitar skills, detailed production work and meticulous lyricism have received superlative recognition from outlets including NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Wired. With rock band Speedy Ortiz, Sadie’s recorded three critically-beloved full lengths, touring alongside heroes The Breeders, Foo Fighters, Liz Phair, and Wilco. As Sad13, she’s self-produced two genre-expansive pop albums, collaborating with Lizzo, Backxwash, Ben Lee, and Helado Negro along the way. External to her personal creative endeavors, Sadie runs the record label and literary journal Wax Nine, which has pressed records by Spacemoth, Melkbelly, and Johanna Warren. She is also a founding organizer with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers and the No Music for ICE campaign, which launched large-scale protests against the exploitation of working musicians, particularly at the hands of tech giants.
While touring has always felt fulfilling to Dupuis, years of gig work also made clear some of the slimiest structural contradictions in nightlife—a world which had once seemed glamorous to her. “I’d lost friends to overdose, and felt anger at the ways in which live music largely ignores the needs of musicians and music fans who use drugs or who face addiction—and how in many ways, artists are encouraged toward untenable living,” Dupuis says. “The chronic underpayment of musicians, the inseparability of venues and alcohol sales, and the arts’ increasing absorption into algorithmically-motivated tech felt like interwoven concerns.” Unequipped to truly process grief away from home, she opted for proactivity, inviting harm reduction organizations to distribute overdose reversal medication and supplies at her bands’ shows. A deeper understanding of harm reduction gave Dupuis a new lens on the inequities she’d sensed in music labor, and from this perspective, she wrote on the road—a first, as she’d previously struggled to create while traveling. Hundreds of pages of poems were written and eventually edited down, forming the manuscript for Cry Perfume.
What's My Address - stories by Lisa Ganser
In their book writing debut, Lisa Ganser paints a Matriarchal, Midwest portrait of a Poor and working class upbringing of displacement and determination. ‘What’s my Address?’ is an honest question that puts an oral herstory to paper. The book is a love ritual that allows the grown-up Lisa an opportunity to express, tend and heal childhood traumas while tapping into the freedom felt being a young kid in the 70s and 80s.
Lisa Ganser is a white, queer, disabled, formerly UNhoused poverty scholar, organizer and artist who tends to Squaxin Land. They currently live & love here in so-called Olympia with their partner, Nomy Lamm. They are a copwatcher, a dog walker, a sidewalk chalker and the daughter of a Momma named Sam.
