Micheal Deforge lands at Vault Detroit with special guest Sadie Dupuis to celebrate the release of their latest books! Pick up copies of Birds of Maine and Cry Perfume at this event and get them signed by the creators.

Michael DeForge is a cartoonist, an illustrator, and a community organizer who lives Toronto, Ontario. His most recent book is Birds of Maine.

Birds of Maine

Long after the demise of humankind, birds roam freely around a new earth complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. Michael DeForge's post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author's quintessential deadpan humor, surrealist imagination, and undeniable sociopolitical insight.

Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter & singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer & multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Sadie heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and has written for outlets including Spin, Tape Op, and Playboy. She is an organizer with the Union of Musicians & Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.

Cry Perfume

The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a four-year period on tour and after losing loved ones and peers to overdose, Dupuis funneled complicated grief into harm reduction advocacy, working to fundraise for and distribute overdose prevention resources in venues internationally. The slick performativity of pop, punk humor, electronic glitch and sampling, and the surprising leaps of improvisation influence these poems, but beyond music, these poems are informed by Dupuis’s larger concerns about justice and organizing. Cry Perfume is a hopeful but realistic inventory of the virtues and evils that emerge when arts and tech collide. Those dualities are cloaked in the same sparkling fragrance, and there are twinned pleasures and regrets in parting the smokescreen.