What Flies Want

Poems

Emily Pérez

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781609388447
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

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.

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