Columbia writer Evelyn Berry’s new collection of poems, "Grief Slut," is a singing, spitting, fire-tower of trust.
Berry does not shy away from the totality of the trans experience. With reverence, she speaks of the body, the memory, the boyhood. In this work, you can feel Berry’s wild, gracious reverence — reverence for life even while it is rich with pain, reverence for a body that remains a question to her sometimes and reverence for boyhood, with the blood and the dirt and the easy touch of play. Her reverence for life itself aches out of the work.
i beseech neighbors for ten dollars / to defile their lawns with rust-baptized blades. / all that’s left behind are dandelions / growing too close to stumps and shallow ditches / i mourn to raze anything that grows so wild.
In celebratory and lurid vignettes, Berry grows to know herself through this world. She mows the neighbor's grass in the same haphazard strokes that she learns to shave. Her intuitive voice threads through the work, asking where nature belongs in her life, and where she belongs in nature. As she grows closer to herself, the poems reflect this nonlinear human boomeranging towards authenticity; the gruesome graduation into truth.
it is difficult to think summer beautiful / without imaging what happens to a peppermint / inside of a locked car, / what happens to a child.
Evelyn Berry's "Grief Slut" is the Columbia poet's debut poetry collection. Book cover provided/Sundress Publications
What she seeks and succeeds to provide, is that fire-tower of trust. Trust in the pain and the change, and what you have been and what you haven’t yet. Berry’s story and her heartrending report of its unfolding offers a lighthouse to every budding identity. Her work cries to bodies-in-process:
bless my body, prelude to a corpse / prologue to whatever comes next. bless / the boy born here. bless my body for / holding my body long enough to / imagine a future.
Her work prompts sprouting identities to trust bravely in their bodies and to relish in their creaturehood. In a culture that is obsessed with control and resolution, she reminds readers — and herself — that one’s body is not a conflict to be resolved. She reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that the body is always taking new and old shapes, none of which are to be taken for granted.
"During a time when queer stories are getting censored and LGBTQ+ books banned, I think it's important to write and publish work that's unapologetically queer,” Berry said. “So often we're forced to present palatable, normative versions of our lives as a means of appealing for basic human dignity, but I hope through stories and poems to dare share something more real."
Berry’s work is not only for the queer reader, though it is likely to remind any reader of their sacred queerness. Her collection is a vivid testament to life, to living through it. She does so without shying away from the gross, the gashes, the grease, the trash caught in the branches along the creek. George Saunders-esque, absurd and brutal, she sings plentifully, a new praise-song, all her own and generous.
we trade every story / of growing up again. we gossipswallow & guttersnark. we nostalgia our friends back to life. we rumor the past into myth, mark each memory as golden / even if we barely survived. / we survived! / remember when, do you remember, but do you — yes, yes! / friend, we have made it here together, yes!
Evelyn Berry has received $25,000 and the title of 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Iva Reed-Manes/Provided
The release party for "Grief Slut" was Jan. 5 at One Columbia, 1013 Duke Ave. Guest poets Jennifer Bartell Boykin (Columbia's poet laureate) and Rhy Robidoux gave readings.
Berry’s next local event following the book release will be a night of readings from local queer poets, held at All Good Books 6-7 p.m. Jan. 27.
Evelyn Berry is a trans Southern woman who writes, edits and educates in Columbia. She's the author of "Grief Slut" (Sundress Publications, 2023) and "Buggery" (Bateau Press, 2020), winner of the BOOM Chapbook Prize. Berry is a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
