Evelyn Berry’s debut poetry collection, Grief Slut, is a vibrant, punchy, pop-laden triumph that explores the poet’s life as a trans woman growing up in the American south. The poems inside are a mix of sweet and tart, grease and glitter, bursting with life like overripe fruit, their juices pooling on the page in all their glorious stickiness so that you come away with their pulpy guts on your fingertips. 

The images sizzle and spark, while the language demonstrates Berry’s gift for musicality. I found myself reading these poems out loud, just to feel the way the words rolled around on my tongue, sumptuous and vivid. 

The book opens with the poem “praise song in lieu of obituary.” Here, rather than a death knell to Berry’s deadname, we get a joyous poem full of acute tenderness and compassion: “bless my body for / holding my body long enough to / imagine a future.” This poem sets us up for what is to follow as Berry explores her childhood and evolution into the woman she was always meant to be, acknowledging the pains of the past, while infusing everything with a tenderness and beauty that is, quite simply, breathtaking.

“we nostalgia our friends back to life,” Berry writes in “iva.” “we rumor the past into myth, / mark each memory as golden / even if we barely survived.”

We see the “grief” of the title in various lights throughout: the grief of childhood; the grief of the boy who wasn’t; the grief of one-night stands; the grief of self-discovery; the grief of loosing someone to suicide; and the grief of being incapable of resurrecting the dead through language. 

Many of the poems in this collection revolve around this potential of language, searching for the words that can make meaning of life and be a home for the queer body. In the end, Berry creates her own language, quite literally, through the creation of new words: holyspirit-humstrung; bruisenumb; rust-baptized; lushsweet; gossipswallow; guttersnark; gender-clumsy.

In Grief Slut, Berry constructs a nuanced and complicated portrait of rural queerness, ferociously confronting America’s glorification of violence while “carv[ing] a home, to hum the trans body / into a song that belongs here.”

‍You can purchase Grief Slut by Evelyn Berry from Sundress Publications here.