What Flies Want
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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.
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I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
TW: mentions of gun violence, allusions to sexual harassment/assault
What Flies Want by Emily Pérez focuses on themes of womanhood, motherhood, violence in America, and the speaker's experiences as a bicultural Latina. Each poem glitters, though there is repetition in theme there is never repetition of the poems themselves. Every piece feels fresh and from the heart.
My favorites included ‘Before I Learned To Be A Girl', ‘Your Mood', ‘What Flies Want Is Not', ‘Corrección/Correction', ‘Out of the Wood-‘, ‘Once I Learned To Be A Girl', ‘You Have All Day', and ‘Vows'.
In these pieces, Pérez skillfully expresses the frustrations girlhood/womanhood, the tensions that arise in a long-term relationship, and the melancholy of straddling two cultures in a world that prizes one over the other. In short, these poems made me feel seen in many ways.
