Rooted in the beauty and violence of Florida’s landscape, these poems are an exploration of love, sex, martyrdom, home, and what we bring with us when we choose poetry to record the intimacies of a life.

“These poems are feral. They are omnivorous. They fuse the saccharine and the grotesque into a kind of emotional banquet—a place where you can’t recall how you arrived, but you know you can’t leave. This is a poet with one hand covered in blood and grease, the other impeccably manicured. The Sorrow Festival will make you feel hot and bothered, sad and giggly all at once, like a spell cast by a horny cave dweller in a funeral gown.”

—Nate Duke, author of A Suit of Paper Feathers

Erin Slaughter is the author of The Sorrow Festival and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her debut short story collection, A Manual for How to Love Us, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in spring 2023. She is editor/co-founder of The Hunger, and her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, CRAFT, Slice, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she co-hosts the Jerome Stern Reading Series. Find her online at erin-slaughter.com

OFFICIAL RELEASE JUNE 2022

ISBN: 9781955904049