Join us for this special National Poetry Month reading, conversation, audience Q&A and book signing! The title of Cry Perfume (Black Ocean, 2022) 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. 

Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter & singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer & multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Sadie heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and is a regular contributor to Spin, Tape Op, Talkhouse, and more. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 by Gramma.  She is an organizer with the Union of Musicians & Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.

WZBC DJ Maura Johnston has written about music and culture for more than 25 years, with pieces published in The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and Rolling Stone and many more. She currently teaches writing at Boston College, and was a founding editor of the music blog Idolator and served as the music editor at The Village Voice.