The Sorrow Festival

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