Little Book of Horror
An interview with Emily Pérez about her second poetry book, What Flies Want
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing poet Emily Pérez about the development of her second book of poems, What Flies Want. We discussed how film genre helped her title and structure the book, plus thoughts on stylistic variation and the interplay of theme and poetic form.
Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize for poetry, and the co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo Fellow and Ledbury Critic, her work can be found in Okay Donkey, DReginald, Cosmonauts Avenue, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. A high school teacher, she lives in Denver with her family. Find more at www.emilyperez.org.
We discuss:
Poet David Campos’s advice about genre that changed Perez’s approach to the book
A poetry book’s ability to address difficult themes in a small space
How the book’s themes emerged—and the themes she left out
Rising to the challenge of the famously difficult second book
Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text. To hear Emily read poems from What Flies Want, check out the video (I highly recommend it).
Little Book of Horror: Emily Pérez on Her Second Book, What Flies Want
[Interview edited for clarity.]
Radha Marcum: I thought we'd start with the book's title. The title is often one of the last elements to be finalized in a manuscript. I'm curious, did you have a working title or multiple working titles? How did you arrive at What Flies Want? Any advice for poets on effective book titles?
Emily Pérez: So this is maybe the third or fourth title for this manuscript? In the waves in which I sent it out, I think there were three different titles. And there was probably a title before that before I started sending it out. The way I arrived at this title is actually a great question because it hits on a number of things about pulling together the manuscript. I'm not great at pulling together a manuscript and ordering is something I really struggle with.
At AWP 2020, I ran into David Campos, a poet in Fresno, and I was telling him about this issue I have with ordering things. And he said, “Oh, I'm happy to help you with that.” What he said was to think of your poetry manuscript as having a genre, and then using the rules of that genre to help order your manuscript.
After he read my working manuscript, he said, “Your genre is horror. And so you need to find a title that speaks to that genre. What titles that you already have feel like they're kind in that vein?” I have a poem in the collection called “What Flies Want Is Not” and he identified What Flies Want as a possible title for the manuscript. On so many levels, it works with the themes in the book, the idea of what’s just spoiled or just past—the things that flies are interested in, that I’m trying to avoid or trying to get away from.
Radha: That’s fascinating. I’ve never heard that approach to figuring out manuscript structure—considering correlations to other genres. That's really interesting.
Emily: I thought it was brilliant. He recommended books on screenplays, because screenwriters have to think in a very structured way. Just thinking about where the different parts of a screenplay occur, then translating your ideas about poetry into that. Where do you introduce the characters? Where do you introduce the conflict? All of that.
Radha: How many years did you take to write the poems that became this book? Where did it start?
Emily: My first full length collection House of Sugar, House of Stone is also sort of a horror. It's a dark fairy tale, which I think the title also reflects. That book was published in 2016. And I learned that it would be published in 2015. I had heard from many people who had been publishing much longer than I that it's hard to write a second book.
I made a commitment in 2015 to start writing a bunch of new stuff, because I didn't want to be asking myself what do I do now? I wanted to get a head start and have a sense of direction. So the earliest poems in that book are from 2015. And I was writing it up through about 2019. All of the poems are pre-pandemic poems. It was about four years of writing, and then another two plus years of submitting and, in that time, all kinds of rearranging and revising, but the bulk of it was done in 2019.
Radha: The more I talk to poets—and having been around the publishing space for a good while now—poets seem to enter into it thinking, I can accomplish a book in a few years, right? I can start this project and it will come to fruition with two, maybe three years intensive work. And a lot of writers think, I should have a book by now. That’s often unrealistic, even for a second book. So, four to five to six years is actually pretty quick development.
The book covers a lot of territory, literally and metaphorically. As the book jacket says:
“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 competence 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 inherent only to find how deeply she is also implicated in these systems.”
It’s for the reader to find all of this in the poems. But, I'm curious, how does poetry address these themes in ways that other genres can't?
Emily: I think that other genres can address these themes, but what is great about poetry is that the book’s poems are both self-contained and interconnected. A book of poetry becomes a collage, or a mosaic where you may see something that's here, and then it's echoed here, and then it's built upon here. There are threads running through.
Unlike a novel, where you're developing a character who has things coming in and out of their life, in a book of poetry, you can have various ideas that are starting to bump up against each other, coming together. You just get these little tastes of them. Then over the course of a book, they build an argument. In that sense, poetry is nimble. It can address a lot of issues more economically than other genres can.
Radha: Did you start with these themes in mind or did they rise out of the writing of these poems?
Emily: A couple of things happened at once. In 2018, a new chapbook press asked me if I had a chapbook. I didn't, but I said I did. And so I had to find 30 pages on something. I looked back at what I had at that point, and found that I had a whole arc on being a girl in a patriarchy. And so I put together a chapbook that got published at the end of 2019. It's called Made and Unmade.
Once I had the chapbook, I felt that it would be the center of whatever came next. The chapbook gave me an anchor point, a spine on which to think, What else goes here? Is this a whole book on this topic? What else could be at play here? And I had a couple of other themes in the chapbook that didn't make it into this book, about bodies and beauty. I took that out. Those may be in the next book.
There were a lot of poems about gender and forming gender identities and gender roles. Meanwhile, I'm a mother of two kids. I’m watching them, very complicit in their growing up and the things that they're learning about their genders and then also the way they're learning about gender relations and about violence. I was writing poems about those issues as well.
I saw how these themes were coming together, writing about systems of power, about patriarchy, masculinity, whiteness—both as they related in my life growing up as a girl and then in my kids’ lives growing up so so then I kind of made the two. The bookends—the opening section and the closing section—are from the perspective of a mother raising male-identifying children, and and also white-identifying children. How are those children poised to inherit these issues and how am I either guiding them into that or guiding them away from it?
Radha: They're so rich, these poems—the layering of image and sensory detail, under the heading of something like “your mood.” It does seem to fit the horror genre.
Emily: There’s one review of my book published by a journal called The Cemetery Dance. They review horror. I love that this journal found my book! The reviewer says there's tension, like what's going to happen? And I definitely wanted to build that into the book.
Radha: These are big themes. And yet, never once in the book do I feel this writer has written a book about this theme. The themes are embodied in all senses of that term.
You have a unique use of certain formal elements. It makes sense that you’re changing forms as you take us through different scenes, different psychologies. For example, I noticed you use slash marks in place of periods or commas, and poems are lineated in different ways. That use of the slash mark comes back almost like a refrain. How did you think about form in relation to the content of the poems? And does that come in early for you? Or is it something that you consider later?
Emily: That’s a really great question. It's a bit of a mystery to myself. The way I compose, I first write prose in my journals. I rarely write in lines. It's only when I'm going back to the material in my journals that I'm trying to figure out, okay, is there a poem in here somewhere? When I'm rewriting material and adding on to it, that's when I start to play with line breaks.
Almost everything starts just as a block of prose. The next step is long, just a continuous stanza form, no stanza breaks. Then it takes me a really long time to let the form evolve after that. It's usually not obvious to me at the beginning, what something's going to become. Some of these poems have gone through several stages. And some have gone through two phases before they found their form. It's not a quick process.
Part of it is through reading it out loud, hearing where I want a surprise to be the surprise of the line break or the tension of the stanza break—the suspense that can be created in the whitespace of a stanza break. Reading out loud helps guide that. The slash mark allows for an in-between space of a line break, but also the running together of ideas. It creates a certain kind of pace that I like. If it’s at the end of a line break, and there's whitespace after it, I think it creates an even harder stop, before you go into the next line. So some of it is just living with the poems for a while reading them out loud, seeing how they talk, where those spaces should come in, and where to break.
Once I have kind of a rough order, poems together, I also want variety in how they look and feel. If there are seven poems in a row that are all shaped the same way, to me that feels too static. And so I want to do something to disrupt the look of the poems on the page, but also the way you feel when you look at them. And the way they feel in your mind and body as you're reading them. So some of that is also in relation to the poem that comes before in the poem that comes after. What should this one look like?
Radha: I talked to the poet Cyrus Cassells recently about his new book. It’s all couplets sustained throughout the book. I don't know what genre his would be. Maybe it's one that has more of a steady flow, less of that element of surprise.
Emily: I really admire a poet who can do that—who can write all in sonnets or in couplets—and keep momentum going that way. And I also feel that there's enough unevenness in the tones I'm creating, I want to make it even more uneven.
Buy What Flies Want from your favorite local bookstore or the University of Iowa Press website. Find more about Emily Perez at EmilyPerez.org. (That’s org, not com.)