An Evangelical Christian and an amateur philosopher try on their mother’s heels; they look in the mirror and see a single face staring back. Delilah McCrea’s debut collection, The Book of Flowers (Pumpernickel House Publishing, 2024) finds comfort in the clashing of absurdities. She sips Baja Blast on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and makes friends with the cacti in the Arizona Desert. She trades jokes with her father’s ghost and sits for long spells with a strange, younger self she no longer recognizes. The Book of Flowers is a bouquet of poems searching for answers to death, destruction, and dysphoria, even while the poet knows any inkling of an answer is an absurd presumption.
As the Ancient Romans had shrines for household gods, McCrea’s shrines might include the crucified Ronald McDonald, half a million honeybees, and a bladeless knife with no handle. She may not worship these tiny gods, ever suspect of authority, but she understands the importance of ritual, of repeating something, anything, to keep from falling apart. Taking cues from memes and classic mythology, McCrea turns the unfamiliar into an old friend. In one poem she writes, “God planted that garden / in gethsemane and used you as the fertilizer.” Only God and McCrea know what will grow next.
I spoke with McCrea over Zoom about the influence of football, the Midwest, and gallows humor in their poetry.
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The Rumpus: Your poems reflect a morbid sense of humor. How important is humor to your work?
Delilah McCrea: Subversion is the primary driver of my poetics. A professor once was teaching us about subversion with a simple lesson. He wrote on the board, “I love you so much I gave you—line break—herpes.” That’s just a joke with a punchline. Humor is all about subversion. Even when I’m not trying to be funny and tell morbid jokes, I’m working through harder emotions. I’m still trying to use that same technique of subversion: give the reader an expectation and then refuse to meet it. To me, so much of poetry’s power comes from its capacity to surprise. Once something becomes familiar, it can become cliché and lose its power.
More simply, humor is a coping mechanism for the heaviest feelings.
Rumpus: Which other poets have influenced you with their humor?
McCrea: The biggest influence for me was Paige Lewis and their first book Space Struck. They’re both funny and heavy hitting. Their poetry is very clever and that draws me in. There is a familiarity with the reader that brings you into a conversation, into a poem, in media res. My favorite poem in that book is titled “The Terre Haute Planetarium Rejected My Proposal” and begins “for a more tactile exhibit, which makes sense when you consider that no one likes being pelted with asteroids.”
Ross Gay was also a huge influence on this book—I ripped off the title of his book! He is so good at weaving these long multipage asides, and even that choice, grammatically, is funny. It also gives him such an opportunity to come back to the emotional whiplash moment.
Rumpus: Calling it The Book of Flowers is a bold play, since flowers get a bad rap in poetry, often seen as cliché. For a poet obsessed with subversion, why did you decide to make them central to this book?
McCrea: I thought my first book would be a completely different book. I spent a year trying to write toward that book, and it just felt forced every time. I had to let myself write something that would help me fall back in love with poetry. Ross Gay taught a workshop at [The Juniper Summer Writing Workshop] that included a bunch of prompts, which inspired me. When I started to look back at what I’d written, unintentionally, all the poems happened to have specific flowers in them. I’d never written about flowers before this period. They just cropped up.
I’d been so stuck on the first book because my conception of its purpose and themes was so narrow. It was like trying to force characters into a narrative arc they just weren’t interested in. So when it came time to figure out a new plan, it felt natural to set this simple rule: every poem will have an image of a specific flower.
Being specific was my attempt to counter the cliché. Never use the word “flower” but some kind of flower’s name. Sometimes I would research their biology or their mythology in literature, and I would try and connect that to the poem’s larger motion.
Clichés become cliché because if you break down what they’re saying, they’re actually very true. Once they’ve been said too many times, they lose meaning. So if you want your reader to experience the actual feelings a cliché is meant to invoke, you have to find a new way to say them. You could just avoid the clichés, or you can include them and transform them, which is what I tried to do with the flowers. Flowers, as purely beautiful objects, are a cliché. I’m not the only one doing this, but I tend toward more morbid imagery, comparing flowers to blood coming out of a cut.
Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina is also a big influence. He’s so good at taking a trope and turning it on its head. Every poem in that book, except the last one, is titled “Creation Myth” and starts [with] “In the Beginning.” The opening line of the first poem is “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird.” Perfect opening to a perfect book. There’s an evergreen appeal in the absurd.
Rumpus: You studied philosophy and joined an Evangelical Christian church for a while. Did these experiences inform your relationship to the absurd?
McCrea: Yes. I wasn’t raised Christian but was sucked into Evangelicalism and dedicated myself to Jesus right before college. It was studying philosophy at college that got me out of that church. I have been clinically diagnosed with Existential Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which explains a lot. Ever since I was young, I needed to know what happened when we died—probably because a lot of my relatives died when I was very young.
My dad died when I was young. I was lonely and depressed and queer and didn’t know it yet. My two closest friends at my country-ass Ohio school were girls raised in the kind of Christian tradition that believes all non-Christians are going to hell. They were genuinely so kind to me, as was everyone at their youth group. Their love was so buoying—and their God was only accessible, their love was only accessible, if I believed what they believed—even if it didn’t make sense to me, as a middle schooler, that all non-Christian people would go to hell. So I did some mental gymnastics until studying philosophy showed me a way out.
Well, also being in a marriage that had the express purpose of repressing our gayness because acting on our gayness would be a sin—I couldn’t believe it anymore.
So to return to absurdity, my OCD wants certainty. It doesn’t care if the certainty is bad. Everyone in the Evangelical world was telling me I could be absolutely certain. So when everything else became too much to bury—because I saw so many queer people and non-Christians having the love and care I was told could only be found through Jesus—the rug got pulled out from under me. All that was left was absurdity. Thinking you have an answer to it all is absurd!
The only place where I wasn’t tormented by uncertainty, the only time when I felt comfortable in mystery and ambiguity, was when I was reading and writing poetry. I can process some of that heaviness better now.
Rumpus: It’s funny, because as writers we often talk about “process” as what we physically do to write, but you’re also using “process” in the emotional, therapeutic sense. Can you talk about how the processing part of your process works?
McCrea: My therapist prescribed me dedicated poetry practice. That’s not a joke. I’ve had many great griefs in my life: the deaths of my parents, my divorce, being rejected by people I care about because I’m trans. And often I’ll have emotional responses to those events that I’m not yet able to consciously understand. The first time I’m able to start processing them is when I write a poem.
When I’m writing that first draft, it feels more like a final draft of all the things I’ve been thinking and ruminating on for so long. That is, if I’m happy with it. Sometimes I write that first draft and never come back to it again. Because the emotional process is so unconscious that I’m often already writing the poem unconsciously.
Rumpus: Do you feel a sense of control when you’re drafting?
McCrea: I believe in the muse, but I’m not an absolutist about it. Not all my poetry comes from some distant, higher place. It’s me writing about my dead mom. I’m working in tandem, however, with something beyond me. I am a vessel, and when the muse comes through me it’s going to look like it came through me.
Rumpus: Some details in your poems feel so specific they almost beg for explanation. “The Republic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has a great sense of place, with objects trapped in nostalgic amber, with an ever encroaching apocalyptic future. How do you land on these details like the “’09 Chevy Cobalt” and the “’90s Cowboys games on VHS?”
McCrea: These two examples show two different ways I approach specificity. The ’09 Chevy Cobalt I pulled from my own life. My best friend in high school drove one. It is a cheap, shitty first-car kind of car, which makes it a good candidate for a giant pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean. It represents manufactured obsolescence, which is that capitalist churn that doesn’t just hurt the consumer, it also has a devastating environmental impact.
The ’90s Cowboys VHS came a little differently. I grew up as a huge football fan, but never cared about the Cowboys. To me, football culture, despite being a fan myself, is one of the best representatives of the toxic Americana I wanted to get at in this poem. Football is religious to many Americans in a way that feels like a dead end. This is how we end up with an ocean garbage patch the size of . . . Texas. The ’90s Cowboys are the pinnacle of that cultural mindset. They were “America’s Team.” People latched onto them to be part of that cultural moment. Everyone wants to be on the winning team.
I wanted to make this image at least one step removed from the most obvious choice. And I wanted it to be tied to that time period of the ’90s because then you get the VHS tapes which are now obsolete, and further contributing to the trash pile.
Rumpus: You wrote many of these poems to process your dad’s death, and after finishing this manuscript, you also lost your mom. Has that changed how you read these poems now?
McCrea: It has changed, of course. Publishing is such a long process that by the time a book comes out, it isn’t necessarily representative of where or who you are anymore. While I’m still very proud of these poems and stand by them, it still feels really strange to go back and present, publicly, a book that is dedicated to my dad. I didn’t add my mom to that dedication after she died. She’s in the acknowledgments, but I wrote this book for my dad, not for her.
I’ve written a lot since my mom died, and those poems are dedicated to her. It is strange to feel my dad’s death, which of course I am not over, be eclipsed by this more recent loss. There are some poems in this book that deal with my mom’s health, and those are hard to return to. My dad died of cancer, and I’ve lost many other family members to cancer. I’m used to death that is expected, that is to say terminal illness. My mom has had chronic health issues her whole life, so I always kind of expected I would lose her young. I thought it would be cancer, and I would have that time of knowing the end was near. Instead, she died of a heart attack out of the blue. In a way, I was processing some pre-grieving, and yet, I wasn’t prepared at all. I’d prepared for the wrong thing.
Rumpus: You move through two distinct landscapes in the book: the nearly alien, desert landscape of the American Southwest, and the liminal Midwest, which is a little fantastical and apocalyptic. How has your sense of home and place influenced this book?
McCrea: This book is so much about processing childhood grief and climate grief. Like everyone else, I experience climate catastrophe through observing the environments I have lived in. I see how they’ve changed over time.
I wrote about the Arizona desert because it’s where I grew up. I hadn’t been back since age eleven, until I was in the middle of writing this book. Some people, when they hear the word “desert,” picture the Sahara, which is not at all what the Arizona desert is like. There are some parts that have dunes, but where I lived there are mountains, cacti, dirt, lots of vegetation, lots of fauna. Some people think it’s barren, but it’s beautiful. It’s ancient and it feels wise. It feels like it holds some of the answers I’m seeking when I write about absurdity, ambiguity, and mystery. It holds the answers in non-language, beyond the reach of my language. I think that’s probably true of all the earth. It feels most true about the desert, to me, because I was born there.
The Midwest is strange to me, because I was a grieving sad confused middle schooler when I arrived. I was strange, and that never left me. My parents were from the Midwest, and we moved back after my dad died. My family is now split between the Midwest and Arizona, so writing this book has been an exercise in explaining the entanglement of these two different parts of this country.
In our lifetime, natural wonder has been surrounded by toxic Americana on an industrial scale. You see memes of a beautiful forest or shore, and the text reads, “You know what would go great here? A McDonalds and A Walmart.” I have a poem called “I Was Baptized in The Cuyahoga River,” and the first line is “while it was on fire.” Because in the 1970’s the Cuyahoga river was so polluted it caught fire. Extremely bad!
Being alive is absurd. Being trans in this world? Is doubly absurd! There’s a million different ways to be trans, so I’m not trying to be prescriptive, but the absurdity of being told by strangers that they know you better than you know yourself?
Being told that the self—the grand philosophical question of the self, which we’ve never been able to agree on—is reduced to “penis” or “vagina”?
On top of humor, which is integral to many trans writers’ poetics whom I admire, is a sense of magical realism. A burning river is both an amazing image that feels unreal but also a symptom of something horribly wrong. I’m drawn to the blending of the fantastical and every day, because of the absurdity of existing as a trans person in a mundane world. Transness pushes against a falsely constructed mundanity. So much mundanity isn’t inherent to human existence but is constructed by capitalism and empire. Being trans demands, for me, that I deconstruct that constructed world, and that opens up to a more magical one.
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Author photograph courtesy of Delilah McCrea
