About the book

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.

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Advance praise

“Matt McBride writes the poetry of my dreams. The deft and often overwhelming quality of his lines makes At the Mercy of the Flies one of the most addictive poetry collections I have ever read. Much of this book will never leave your mind.” —CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank and Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

“At the Mercy of the Flies is a fever that refuses to break. These poems slice through an ever-defamiliarizing world. Each taut stanza grounds the book in the real but twists the birds and sandbags and dandruff into the mystic and ontologically porous, both apocalyptic and transcendent. The surrealism is often eerie and estranging, but just as often personal and intimate. It merges the impossible possibilities to which we’ve acquiesced with impossible impossibilities that might just liberate us. Matt McBride’s poetry is unnerving and alert, joyfully illuminating our current alienations.” —Mathias Svalina, author of Comedy and creator of the Dream Delivery Service

“Matt McBride possesses a rare imagination, one that unearths a strange beauty from the everyday. In At the Mercy of the Flies, he delivers a surrealist fever dream where the mundane and the macabre collide under the flickering fluorescents of a Dollar General. Haunting, visceral, and tinged with humor—this is a poet everyone should be reading.” —Noah Falck, author of Exclusions

Press & reader reviews

“Yet the poems never surrender to despair. They insist on the possibility of meaning within distortion, not a neat or consoling meaning but one forged out of fracture, crisis, and the mind’s instinct to keep going. Estrangement shifts perception. If the world refuses to cohere, the mind invents new logics, new images, new ways of holding experience. McBride’s poems follow that impulse, leaving images and atmospheres that persist long after the book is closed, reminders of how catastrophe reshapes not only what we feel but how we see. Demanding, immersive, and fiercely attuned to the protean present, At the Mercy of the Flies is a book to read now, and to return to.” A review by Ellen Kirkpatrick for The Break

“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.” An essay by Matt McBride for the Half Mystic blog

About the author

Matt McBride is the author of two full-length collections, City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018) and At the Mercy of the Flies (Half Mystic, 2026), 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. Currently, he lives in Chambersburg, PA, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Wilson College. Find him online at www.mattmcbridepoetry.com.

Reader & launch photos

Coming soon!