“These poems were a map of the ocean I’d crossed.” (Matt McBride on At the Mercy of the Flies)
Half Mystic Press’ latest poetry collection, At the Mercy of the Flies by Matt McBride, comes out on April 28. Matt is the author of City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018) as well as four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, is available from Survision Books. He is the winner of the James Tate Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Ohio Chapbook Award. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant, an Elliston Poetry Fellowship, and a Writers in the Heartland residency. To celebrate At the Mercy of the Flies, he joins us on the Half Mystic blog for a guest essay on the creation process of the book.
I’m not an advocate for writing as therapy. “Writing can be therapeutic,” I sometimes tell my students, “but it’s not therapy.” Despite this, At the Mercy of the Flies started as an attempt to process the end of an eleven-year relationship that felt like the end of much more. In 2015, I got divorced and made the somewhat arbitrary decision to accept a teaching job in Wuhan, China. The divorce was amicable, but I wanted to run as far away from my old life as possible, somewhere no one knew me. I wanted to be a stranger for a while. At the time, international flights allowed for two suitcases. I took only one, filled with the longest books I owned and a year’s supply of contact lenses.
While in China, I fell into my own shadow. I’ve struggled with depression on and off for my adult life, and though I’d left everyone I knew behind, the illness stayed with me. There are no open container laws in China, so I self-medicated by drinking and walking for hours through Wuhan. I wanted to be lost.
I’d studied Chinese for a year prior to living there. Sober, I could trade a few pleasantries, barter, ask for directions. But after a few beers, the language turned to static, just another haze covering the city.
Residents referred to Wuhan as China’s biggest construction site, and the scale of the demolition I witnessed was a perfect analogue for how I felt. While walking, I scribbled lines inspired by what I saw, more out of habit than a desire to write. Though the images were surreal—extension cords making drunk signatures on a lake, gray yarn trailing from clouds—they were earnest depictions of a life I felt increasingly estranged from. By the end of my year in Wuhan, I had a notebook full of lines that would coalesce into the first section of At the Mercy of the Flies, “The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At.”
The poems didn’t heal me, but they did allow me to see my experience as significant. The photographs I took, the pages-long emails I wrote to friends—none of them captured the black inside of me where I floated in my inflatable raft. But these poems were a map of the ocean I’d crossed. The act of writing didn’t make me whole, but it meant something to have a document of what I’d lived through.
After a year, I left China and took a first-year writing lectureship at the University of Iowa, a return to the same job I’d been doing for over a decade. I had a windowless, cinder block office, often confused for a supply closet, next to the women’s restroom. I was one of two dozen other lecturers teaching a class no one asked to take. I’d traveled halfway around the world and back, yet had gone nowhere. My friends were publishing books, getting the types of jobs I was supposed to get, having kids, posting about all of it on social media.
Early on in Iowa City, I befriended another lecturer, John, also divorced, and we spent most nights talking on a thrift store couch in his screened-in porch. To expand our social circle, John planned to hold a party at his house. He had two dozen glasses, originally made for a wedding that never ended up happening. He bought a ping pong table and built a fire pit. But the date of the party kept being pushed further and further back.
At the same time, America shrugged its shoulders and decided to give fascism a trial run. Trump was elected for the first time that November. The America Trump described was every bit as imaginary as John and I’s party, and the choice our country had made got me thinking about the word “party.” Trump’s platform was a hiatus from responsibility; its excess was its point. His lack of thought, taste, and consequence was his ethos. He was making the Republican Party a “party” again.
It was both farcical and horrifying, and I responded—as I respond to almost everything—by writing. I didn’t do it out of a sense that my poems would change anything, but rather as a way to explain the world to myself—to feel like I had some agency, even if my only power was as a witness. Trump may have been immune to consequence, but he was not immune to history or art. Again, the surrealism in my poems was earnest. It felt like the only honest way to depict a culture so untethered from reality. These fragments were collected into the closing section of At the Mercy of the Flies, “The Party.”
The next year, my first book, City of Incandescent Light, came out. The collection helped land me a new job at a small college—not a fabled tenure-track position, but at least I was teaching poetry. I fell in love again, became a dad. I’d traveled far from the person who’d written those poems in Wuhan and Iowa City.
Then came the next presidential election, where I had little hope that Biden’s promises were any less impossible than those proffered by Trump. It felt as though Americans wanted the same thing, called something different. Our only goal was to keep the party going without worrying about the inevitable hangover. So I circled back to the poems I’d written four years before. I understood that these and the poems I was writing during Biden’s presidency described the same tortured party—and that it wouldn’t end until we were forced to leave.
“The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At,” “The Party,” and “The Age Of”—an interstitial section bridging the gap between them—make up At the Mercy of the Flies. This book is my strange witness to a strange world. I’ve worked on it for a decade, and I hope that by finally letting it go, it might work on someone else.
At the Mercy of the Flies renders the mundanity of daily life as a series of dislocations. In brief, lucid scenes, these poems map estrangement and excess onto surreal worlds where ambulances play Katy Perry, pearls rain from the sky, and every screen glows with impossible promises. What emerges is a record of survival written in the margins of collapse. Anchored in the author’s experiences with depression and the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, At the Mercy of the Flies charts the cartographies of a life and a nation in freefall. No party lasts forever—not even America.
Until April 28th, 10% of preorder sales for At the Mercy of the Flies will go toward mutual aid in occupied Gaza, directly supporting two Palestinian families. Additionally, author Matt McBride is matching each preorder with a donation—so a $15 purchase becomes $16.50 of food and care. The book is out on Tuesday.