What flies want Poems

Emily Pérez

Book - 2022

"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 bi-cultural family on the US/Mexico border, once felt she "need[ed] nothing but my own fine fire." She soon learns she must play a role in a culture that prizes whiteness, patriarchy, and chauvinism. As an adult she oscillates between performed confidence--"skating by in my glittery skirt, waving"--and performed obedience--"I supplicant, compliant / ...I reliable client." 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. In poems both subtly and overtly musical, Emily Pérez's second collection asks if we can escape the quiet violence that seeps through our everyday lives"-- more