Grief Slut is Evelyn Berry’s debut poetry collection, 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.” Torrin A. Greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, calls Grief Slut “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.” Han VanderHart, author of What Pecan Light, describes Grief Slut as “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.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2023) and Buggery (Bateau Press, 2020), winner of the BOOM Chapbook Prize. She’s a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, 2022 Dr. Linda Veldheer Memorial Prize, 2019 Broad River Prize for Prose, and 2018 Emrys Poetry Prize, among other honors. Berry has been performing in venues around the country (and world!) for more than ten years. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, South Carolina Review, Gigantic Sequins, Raleigh Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER
Sarah Cooper is a queer, lesbian, Canadian American poet. The author of 89% (Clemson University Press, 2022) and Permanent Marker (Paper Nautilus, 2020), she is a professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Clemson University. Cooper lives in Greenville, South Carolina.
