What Flies Want
$20.00
by Emily Pérez
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.
Paperback | 96 pages | University Of Iowa Press | 2022
Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbooks Backyard Migration Route and Made and Unmade. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned an MFA at the University of Houston. In Houston she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Emerging Critic, she has received support from the Washington State Artist Trust; Jack Straw Writers; Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop; Summer Literary Seminars; and the Community of Writers. Her poems have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry, and other journals. Her reviews of poetry and prose have appeared in RHINO, The Boston Review, LARB, The Guardian, and The Rumpus. She works as a high school teacher and dean in Denver where she lives with her family.
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