What Flies Want: Poems
Colorado Book Award - poetry finalist

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.

The speaker, who grew up in a bicultural family on the U.S./Mexico border, learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult she oscillates between performed confidence and obedience. As a wife, she bristles against the expectations of emotional labor. As a mother, she attempts to direct her white male children away from the toxic power they are positioned to inherit, only to find how deeply she is also implicated in these systems. Tangled in a family history of depression, a society fixated on guns, a rocky relationship, and her own desire to ignore and deny the problems she must face, this is a speaker who is by turns defiant, defeated, self-implicating, and hopeful.
1140498465
What Flies Want: Poems
Colorado Book Award - poetry finalist

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.

The speaker, who grew up in a bicultural family on the U.S./Mexico border, learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult she oscillates between performed confidence and obedience. As a wife, she bristles against the expectations of emotional labor. As a mother, she attempts to direct her white male children away from the toxic power they are positioned to inherit, only to find how deeply she is also implicated in these systems. Tangled in a family history of depression, a society fixated on guns, a rocky relationship, and her own desire to ignore and deny the problems she must face, this is a speaker who is by turns defiant, defeated, self-implicating, and hopeful.
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What Flies Want: Poems

What Flies Want: Poems

by Emily Pérez
What Flies Want: Poems

What Flies Want: Poems

by Emily Pérez

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Overview

Colorado Book Award - poetry finalist

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.

The speaker, who grew up in a bicultural family on the U.S./Mexico border, learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult she oscillates between performed confidence and obedience. As a wife, she bristles against the expectations of emotional labor. As a mother, she attempts to direct her white male children away from the toxic power they are positioned to inherit, only to find how deeply she is also implicated in these systems. Tangled in a family history of depression, a society fixated on guns, a rocky relationship, and her own desire to ignore and deny the problems she must face, this is a speaker who is by turns defiant, defeated, self-implicating, and hopeful.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609388447
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication date: 05/11/2022
Series: Iowa Poetry Prize
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 96
File size: 575 KB

About the Author

Emily Pérez is author of House of Sugar, House of Stone and coedited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. She works as a high school teacher and dean, and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Read an Excerpt

"Primer"

I learned my mother’s white
tongue, her white words
in white books impressed on crisp
white pages, stories set in white countries
under soft, white snow. I’d never seen snow,
but knew enough to desire its cleansing
cold, its regions where the white-cheeked
damsel with her long, white hair could cede
space to the knight, white on his horse
who whinnied whitely. I’d never ridden a horse,
but knew to fantasize about one, as that’s what white
girls did, and even if I never got bedded
by a stable hand or CEO, some tall white man
who could explain things to me, I knew that if I learned
the white language, its syntax and rightness, then,
like a cloud pristine and drifting, I’d be lifted,
I’d look down on my dark home from that unbroken sky.
 

Table of Contents

Contents

*

My Son Is

My Children Use the American Flag

Before I Learned to Be a Girl

Battle Song

Nightwatch

Outbound Flight

Anniversary

Your Mood

I Want These Problems to Stay Quiet Problems

My Next Book Is Called

My Son Is

Accoutrements

On This Day

Today I Wonder What If No One Finds Her

Dinner Conversation

Deciding to Renew Our Vows

The Door / Locked

Aftermath

What Flies Want Is Not

*

How I Learned to Be a Girl

Primer

You Mattered to Me

I Grew Up at the Feet of Unpredictable

Yes, All Women

How I Learned to [ ]

I Have No Right to Speak Because

Dear Whiteness,

Corrección / Correction

Song for My Daughter

Out of the Wood-

Pardon Me, Yes Please, No Thank You

Accounting

Please, Whiteness,

Prayer for My White Son

At the Hotel Pool

*

Once I Learned to Be a Girl

Rose Moon

When You Balance

When He Comes

Lockdown, 1st Grade

My Son Is

I Wanted a Full Dose of Never-Mind of Not-Ever-

Today’s Arc

Boding

Hindsight: Part III

You Have All Day

After Watching the Vampire Movie

Every Man’s a Ticking Bomb

Vows

When You Slipped into the Lake

Ten Years Later My Husband Walks Out of the Woods

Stolen Things: Part III

Second-Grade Drop-Off

Darling, I Would Never // That I’d Ever Want

My Son Is

Underground /

Tonight When They Try On My Bra

I Have Plenty

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