The Sorrow Festival

by Erin Slaughter

Overview

This collection of poetry interrogates the impact of grief and partner violence on a family lineage, as well as the connections between sorrow and joy as they relate to poetry, women's writing, and the process of the “confessional.”

Inextricably woven into these investigations of various types of grief is the question of what gendered and socioeconomic statuses we bring with us when we choose poetry as a method of recording the intimacies of a life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781955904049
Publisher:	CLASH Books
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Pages:	138
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 4.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor of the Southeast Review and co-hosts the Jerome Stern Reading Series. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.

Table of Contents

I Digging Teeth Out of the Garden

The heart of the warrior is a moon-faced thing 17

Notes on Un-Apology 19

Failed Animals 20

How We Reckon 22

The Beekeeper's Abortion 26

[not these white pills laced with sun] 28

Inevitably you will know people 30

Elegy for Recording the Light 32

Late September Early October Hemorrhage 34

Holding the Loose Bones Close 35

II River

[River] 43

III Land of the Rootfisted 49

These Weeks Are Exceedingly Floral 51

The Cool Girl Façade Begets its Own Layer of Animal Grief 53

No Horses 55

Hurricane Fragments 56

Splinterwood Solstice 64

I Hope My Salt Lamp is a Weeping Deity 65

Ars Poetica as Elegy 68

Inheritance 70

At the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River 71

(The Billboard Claims) Caged Tigers Live Longer in Lafayette 73

IV Gulf Epistolary 77

[Gulf Epistolary] 49

V Sun Come Antlered 91

August, a Decade of Grief Stories 93

Christmas Day Blackblooded I Get Everything I Want 94

Admission (An Ars Poetica) 96

Genealogy: Legumes 98

Coyote 100

Nashville Year 102

Aubade with Finches & New Mattress 104

I saw the parade of snakebirds & understood 106

Tallahassee Spring 108

Ars Poetica as Eulogy 111

My Wish is at Least Once A Week to Feel More Flame than Flammable 113

Notes 119

Acknowledgements 123

About the Author 127

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR ERIN SLAUGHTER

"A poem can slice you right open and get down to something inside you like the very core of a jawbreaker and linger there. I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun by Erin Slaughter is a bundle of these poems left on your front doorstep as an offering. Here, Slaughter melts loneliness down; she writes of wandering through a world where none of us and all of us are truly alone." —The Talisman (review by Ella Corder)
"This book is grimoire, is grain silo, is Americana and marginalia, is a hotel room across state lines. Slaughter gleans and gathers up deliciousness: ashes and gin, winged liner, bleach, blackberry throb, tootsie rolls, dirty martinis, cheese shards and a deer carcass, a store-bought orchid, a peeled ankle. Soak yourself in this work, its every sensation—like flesh falling off the rib, vicious and bittersweet. I WILL TELL THIS STORY TO THE SUN UNTIL YOU REMEMBER YOU ARE THE SUN is not to be missed—o 'horrible brightness,' o 'lovelaced void,' a 'radiating dark' that will have you hollering yes. Oh hell yes." —Emily Corwin, author of tenderling and sensorium
"'Forgiveness, your mouth / is the wet hungering mouth of the world / & its hungering for itself,' writes Erin Slaughter in her collection I WILL TELL THIS STORY TO THE SUN UNTIL YOU REMEMBER YOU ARE THE SUN. The speaker here is the 'actor in [her] own quiet being,' and in her full-bodied inhabitation of difficult inheritances, fraught beauties, and inevitable losses. These are poems of praise and consolation, of gratitude and grief; they reach toward hope even as they note the kindnesses we offer to the 'small, cruel moments [that] will ruin us.' Slaughter's poems brim with musicality and keen vision. They linger in a moment when we are not quite enough for one another and when we are all each other has." —Paula Cisewski, author of Quitter, Ghost Fargo, and Upon Arrival

From the Publisher