eBook - ePub
About this book
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.
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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Yes, you can access What Flies Want by Emily Pérez in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
IOWA POETRY PRIZE AND EDWIN FORD PIPER POETRY AWARD WINNERS
1987
Elton Glaser, Tropical Depressions
Michael Pettit, Cardinal Points
1988
Bill Knott, Outremer
Mary Ruefle, The Adamant
1989
Conrad Hilberry, Sorting the Smoke
Terese Svoboda, Laughing Africa
1990
Philip Dacey, Night Shift at the Crucifix Factory
Lynda Hull, Star Ledger
1991
Greg Pape, Sunflower Facing the Sun
Walter Pavlich, Running near the End of the World
1992
Lola Haskins, Hunger
Katherine Soniat, A Shared Life
1993
Tom Andrews, The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle
Michael Heffernan, Love’s Answer
John Wood, In Primary Light
1994
James McKean, Tree of Heaven
Bin Ramke, Massacre of the Innocents
Ed Roberson, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In
1995
Ralph Burns, Swamp Candles
Maureen Seaton, Furious Cooking
1996
Pamela Alexander, Inland
Gary Gildner, The Bunker in the Parsley Fields
John Wood, The Gates of the Elect Kingdom
1997
Brendan Galvin, Hotel Malabar
Leslie Ullman, Slow Work through Sand
1998
Kathleen Peirce, The Oval Hour
Bin Ramke, Wake
Cole Swensen, Try
1999
Larissa Szporluk, Isolato
Liz Waldner, A Point Is That Which Has No Part
2000
Mary Leader, The Penultimate Suitor
2001
Joanna Goodman, Trace of One
Karen Volkman, Spar
2002
Lesle Lewis, Small Boat
Peter Jay Shippy, Thieves’ Latin
2003
Michele Glazer, Aggregate of Disturbances
Dainis Hazners, (some of) The Adventures of Carlyle, My Imaginary Friend
2004
Megan Johnson, The Waiting
Susan Wheeler, Ledger
2005
Emily Rosko, Raw Goods Inventory
Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk
2006
Elizabeth Hughey, Sunday Houses the Sunday House
Sarah Vap, American Spikenard
2008
Andrew Michael Roberts, something has to happen next
Zach Savich, Full Catastrophe Living
2009
Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea
Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night
2010
Julie Hanson, Unbeknownst
L. S. Klatt, Cloud of Ink
2011
Joseph Campana, Natural Selections
Kerri Webster, Grand & Arsenal
2012
Stephanie Pippin, The Messenger
2013
Eric Linsker, La Far
Alexandria Peary, Control Bird Alt Delete
2014
JoEllen Kwiatek, Study for Necessity
2015
John Blair, Playful Song Called Beautiful
Lindsay Tigue, System of Ghosts
2016
Adam Giannelli, Tremulous Hinge
Timothy Daniel Welch, Odd Bloom Seen from Space
2017
Alicia Mountain, High Ground Coward
Lisa Wells, The Fix
2018
Cassie Donish, The Year of the Femme
Rob Schlegel, In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps
2019
William Fargason, Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara
Jennifer Habel, The Book of Jane
2020
Emily Pittinos, The Last Unkillable Thing
Felicia Zamora, I Always Carry My Bones
2021
Emily Pérez, What Flies Want
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- 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
- Notes & Acknowledgments
- Series List