Grief Slut, Evelyn Berry

Evelyn Berry’s debut poetry collection, Grief Slut, is an examination of the queer lineage of pleasure, grief, and resilience in the American South. Berry offers a portrait of a girl living through boyhood and grappling with the violence of nostalgia in poems that blend high art, archival slivers, and Taco Bell. This collection invites us into a landscape home to sloppy kissers, swamp suitors, scrappy “limbwrecked boys,” and drag queens drenched in glitter sweat, where “each day is trespass” and queer youth fight to “hear one another breathe just a little while longer.”

“Grief Slut is a feral, ode-mouthed debut, tawdry and raw as a picked scab. Each of Berry’s poems is a small explosive mote of memory, steeped in the history and iconography of the rural queer South. This collection elevates high and low culture alike to the position of the sublime, Taco Bell and Caravaggio are given equal weight in these poems’ lyric exploration. And even as these poems grapple with historical and ongoing attacks against trans rights, and the places we call sanctuary, Berry refuses to present a tidy and palatable version of transness, instead illuminating the gut-punch gorgeous mess of our lives.”

—torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound

“Unflinching in its sensuality and brutality, Grief Slut exposes the paradoxical nature of queer life in the South. Required reading in an age of trans discrimination, Berry’s lines will serve as balm and bulwark. exposing the joyous heartbreak of rural queerness.”

—Sim Kern, author of The Free People’s Village and Seeds From the Swarm

“Gorgeous & luxurious as couture the morning after the party, Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut is a book-length aubade to the genderqueer self and body, to the South, to violence and desire and Baja Blast. Grief Slut is a riotously beautiful collection of poems, a love song to flesh and the experience of too muchness that is oh-so-human, oh-so-queer, and oh-so-Southern.”

—Han VanderHart, author of What Pecan Light