Everything Is Built on Corpses, and Still We Bloom | A Conversation with Delilah McCrea

By Noor Hindi

In her debut collection of poems, The Book of Flowers, Delilah McCrea writes into a space where absurdity, grief, wonder, and queerness collide. Blending surreal prose poems with sharp lyric fragments, the book builds a landscape rooted in mourning, magic, and the American grotesque—where Ronald McDonald stands on a pile of corpses, and flowers bloom from wounds. In this conversation with Noor Hindi, McCrea discusses the prose poems at the book’s core, her early influences, and the way writing helped her move toward herself—as a poet, as a trans woman, and as someone always asking impossible questions. 

Noor: My favorite poems in the book are the prose poems. I love the different styles you write in, but the prose poems, in particular, feel like rants—like sad rants to me. I wondered if you could talk about that process of writing them, especially as it relates to the sense of continuity they have throughout the book. 

Delilah: I think of those poems as the center of the book. The first one I wrote was A Tired King Constructs a Shopping Mall.

I discovered a Twitter account called Magical Realism Bot that generated surreal, almost story-like tweets. I started using those tweets as poem titles.

One of them was A Tired King Constructs a Shopping Mall Filled with Existence. I used that as a jumping-off point and just wrote whatever came to mind. That poem ended up as a long prose block—almost like flash fiction. Writing it felt different, like one of my best pieces up to that point. 

By the time I had written the third one, Caryl Pagel—who was my favorite professor and my thesis director—told me, I feel like these prose poems are your best work. When she gave me her first round of feedback on my thesis project as a whole, she said, I think you should write more of these prose poems and make them the core of the book.

Noor: I love the idea of receiving inspiration from Magical Realism Bot because of the tones of humor, sarcasm, and apathy throughout the book, and this collection’s embrace of surrealism. 

Can you talk a little bit about how surrealism plays a role in your writing and how it speaks to this sense of the existential despair of maybe living in America right now, or to just be alive, in general? 

Delilah: I love surrealism and magical realism in all forms of media. When I was writing this book, I read two books that I would cite as the biggest direct influences: Space Struck by Paige Lewis and Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina. Both of those collections are deeply magical realist and surrealist. When I discovered those poets, I fell in love with their work immediately. It felt like home to me.

As I leaned more into surrealism, I realized that when poetry first clicked for me—when I first thought, Oh, I could actually be good at this is when I started to embrace weirdness. Magical realism, even more than surrealism, helped refine that instinct. Seeing it in works like Paige Lewis, especially as a fellow trans writer, gave me a focus for my desire to lean into the strange.

What I love about magical realism is how it blends the strange with the mundane. Once you’ve had a political awakening, you start to see the absurdity of everyday life everywhere. Like, suddenly, you realize—oh, actually, McDonald’s is built on corpses.

Everything is built on corpses. But specifically, the strangeness of something like Ronald McDonald standing on a pile of corpses to sell you hamburgers—it’s horrifying and devastating, but it’s also so absurd that you almost have to laugh.

Noor: That actually leads me to another question—the absurdity and humor in your collection. I will never read the Ronald McDonald poem without laughing out loud. But at the same time, it’s a deeply sad poem. Your surrealism carries this vast sadness and misery, but also wonder.

How do you navigate holding those two modes—humor and despair—within a poem?

Delilah: I think my best work—is when I can hold those two things in tension. Poetry has become so important to me because it’s the one place in my life where I can do that. 

I’m always holding those two things—because I studied philosophy in college, and I have existential OCD, I’m never not thinking about mortality. I’m also trans, and all my friends are marginalized in different ways. I’ve been a leftist for years, so I’m constantly thinking about mortality, capitalism, empire, and climate collapse.

But the reason I’m still alive is because I’ve had so many moments of love, wonder, and awe in spite of all that. A lot of times, though, I feel insane, especially the existential part of me—the part of me that wants logical answers to everything. It’s like, How can this deep, deep love and connection exist in a world where the most powerful people don’t care about other human beings at all?

Noor: That tension is so present in your work. The tenderness of the recurring images of flowers, the violence of death, the absence of losing someone, the grief of living, and the violence of empire—all of these themes are explored with humor and tenderness in your book.

This tension is present especially in the flower imagery. I wonder if you could talk about their importance to you, both as a person and as a writer.

Delilah: As I wrote the book and continued writing afterward, flowers came to mean a lot of different things to me. There’s a strong connection I feel between flowers and my identity as a trans woman.

Which, on the surface, is kind of an obvious cliché—flowers are seen as this traditionally feminine, “girly” thing. But the way I write about flowers in the book feels deeply tied to my gender experience. Often, the flowers in my poems are presented in a morbid way—blood coming from wounds, things like that. In a way, my femininity feels like that too. It’s something that emerged from wounds. Or maybe, because of them.

Finally coming into my gender and identity felt like looking at those wounds and, instead of seeing blood, seeing flowers blooming out of them. Seeing something really beautiful growing from so much pain.

Noor: You seem to have certain obsessions—things that keep coming up in your work—like, grief is so prevalent in this book. And not just grief, but this deep questioning—not only the heartbreak of losing someone, but also: What does it even mean to be alive? What is faith?

I wonder how those themes emerged in the book, and how you were using it to process your own grief and your existential OCD.

Delilah: As far as specific obsessions, my dad died when I was eight years old. So, probably the fact that I have existential OCD ties back to that. I started thinking about death all the time. Mortality. The fact that I could and would lose the people I love.

And it wasn’t just my dad. I mean, he was the one that hit the hardest, but my family just has bad health—so much cancer. 

So that’s where the obsession with death and grief comes from. I was feeling it all the time. I was losing people I cared about at a young age, and I was trying to figure out what that meant. And nobody gives you good answers. Ever. But especially not when you’re a kid.

Because they don’t think you can handle it.

Noor: And there are no good answers, right?

Delilah: Right. But they don’t even think you can handle that truth. So they try to give you these other answers instead, and that’s frustrating.

Then, in high school, my best friends converted me to fundamentalist Christianity. I stayed that way for a few years, but eventually, I couldn’t hold down the questions I had the whole time. And I abandoned it while I was in undergrad. So by the time I started grad school, I had just come out of two years of a major crisis of faith. And that’s why so much of the writing in this book ties those two things together. 

And I’m always thinking about God when I’m thinking about death. Because if God exists, then God has some hand in death.

That’s why, in my writing, when I’m asking questions about the people I’ve loved and lost—when I’m writing to those people—I’m also writing to God. I’m also questioning God.

And another thing I’ve always had is this unshakable feeling that I’m not alone. And I think that’s something that comes up a lot in this book—these moments where it’s like… sometimes I want to not believe in anything, because it would be easier. But even when I want to, I don’t think I actually can.

Noor: Yeah, I mean, so much of this book feels like searching for God—grasping—and ultimately, I think a poem is just a failed attempt at grasping some kind of meaning after turmoil. And I wonder, throughout your journey as a writer, have you found God in unconventional places?

Delilah: The poem All My Poems Are Prayers is one of my favorites in the book because it’s true. I really do feel that way about my poems. And the opening line is: Which is why I couldn’t tell you what they mean. It’s why I find God easiest in poetry—because poetry is the one place where I feel comfortable holding the unknown and the uncertain.

And that’s where I find God the most. To me, God exists in the unknown, in uncertainty, in the parts of life and experience that can’t be understood and can’t be put into language.

Noor: I love that. Do you ever read these poems today—because you wrote them before you fully identified as a trans woman—and wonder how they navigate gender and queerness in ways you didn’t realize at the time?

Delilah: Yeah, I see it so clearly now. When I wrote this book, I identified as nonbinary. I hadn’t started hormones yet—I didn’t even know if I wanted to start hormones.

I wasn’t using the name I go by now, but I also wasn’t using my birth name. I was going by a gender-neutral name. I really thought of myself as neutral in terms of gender. But by the time I started my MFA program in 2018, I already had inklings that I was more feminine than I was letting myself admit.

And the way I see that in the queerness and gender themes of this book is in all the sadness, the pain, the anger. There’s still a lot of that in my writing about gender today—but now, it’s directed. And there’s also joy now. I love being a trans woman. I love trans women. I think we’re better than everybody else.

And my anger now is at how the world treats us. But back when I wrote this book, I didn’t fully know where to direct that anger. Obviously, I was angry at transphobia—I could identify that—but I didn’t yet understand that when I heard about trans women being killed more than anyone else, I felt like it was happening to me.

The other place I really see it is in a poem from this book called I Never Write About Desire. The opening line is, By which, of course, I mean sex. And at the time I wrote that poem, it was true.

I wrote it because I was reading so many queer and trans poets that I loved, and they all wrote a lot of sensual poetry— Poetry that celebrated their bodies and their queerness. And I had never written a single poem that could be called sensual. All of my poems were full of violence. Especially if they were embodied—those bodies were bleeding. They were experiencing violence.

Noor: Yes. You even write, The only warm and wet I can imagine is a wound carved in my own wrist.

Delilah: Exactly. That was so true then. And it’s so not true now. Since moving to Michigan, starting hormones, and really coming into myself as a trans woman, so much of my poetry has become deeply erotic. Especially the stuff I write about God now.

Almost every time I write about God, it’s an erotic poem. Because I connect my queerness, my sexuality, and my body with the divine. And that was something I just couldn’t do yet, back when I wrote this book. At that point, I was still so disconnected from my body.

Noor: How do you feel things have shifted for you since publishing the book?

Delilah: I mean—literally, this has been my dream my entire life. I know a lot of people say that, but I think I have most people beat. Because I remember the exact day when I was four years old that I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Noor: Yeah, you got most people beat.

Delilah: Exactly. I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. 

The book was accepted for publication in December of the same year my mom passed away. So, my initial response was a total overwhelm of emotion. I immediately thought about my mom—she always loved and supported my work. She didn’t just support my desire to be a writer; she’d read my published stuff and really enjoyed it.

I thought about how I always imagined I’d celebrate that moment with her, but then I also thought that in some way, I probably was celebrating with her. Then, you know, it's weird—the book gets accepted, but then it takes a long time for anything else to happen.

You have all these conversations, and the next thing was that I got the cover art I’d wanted for years. When the artist said yes, I was like, this is incredible. It’s everything I ever wanted. It was perfect.

And then you think the first time you hold the physical book is going to be this huge moment, right? You think you’ll have this huge emotional response. But it’s strange—the first time you hold the book, it’s not the final version. It’s like an early page proof with errors in it. No one tells you that!

I think I’m still having the experiences that are making it feel real—over and over again. I just had a book launch party, and that really made it feel real. Getting to sit there and sign books for the first time — it was amazing. And in this case, it was a private event, so I was signing books for people I really love and care about. That made it feel real.

I’m about to go to New York for my first out-of-state book launch reading, and that feels amazing too. I’m sure it’ll feel surreal in the moment. But in other ways, it’s like… I’m still working the same job. So, yeah, it is huge that I got published. It did change things, but in other ways, it didn’t change anything.

Noor: You mentioned the cover art. I absolutely love this piece. The person is sitting on a prickly pear cactus, which is definitely not a comfortable place to sit. But they look so content. So much of the book is rooted in Arizona and its landscape. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Arizona and how that landscape shows up in the book. I think it's such an important backdrop, even though you wrote much of the book while you were in Ohio.

Delilah: I was born in Tucson, and I grew up there until I was 11, in the Sonoran Desert part of Arizona. I’ve only been back once as an adult, but when I went back, it felt so much like home. It feels more like home to me than anywhere else. And so much of the book touches on themes of climate catastrophe and eco-poetics.

A lot of it deals with how I was witnessing and experiencing that while living in the Midwest. But for me, when I’m anywhere besides the desert, my love for the earth is more altruistic—it’s because I know how important the earth is, and because I believe in the connection of everything, and that I am connected to everything else.

It’s not to say I don’t enjoy nature; I like a hike, I appreciate mountains, trees, rolling hills. But I don’t feel something deep inside me, unless I’m in the desert. When I’m in the desert, I feel like I’m being held by the mountains and the saguaro cacti.

And so much of the way I write about it in the book is using grief and loss to draw these lines connecting Tucson, where I was born and where my father died, to Northeast Ohio, where my father was born and spent most of his life, and where I spent the rest of my life after his death.

I also think the cover image is perfect for the book. It’s not just about the cactus and how it relates to Arizona, but also the person sitting in the cactus. In reality, that would be extremely painful and dangerous, but the way it’s portrayed—it looks tender. It looks like they’re being held lovingly by the cactus.

Noor: What are you working on now?

Delilah: Right now, I’m working on a collection of prose poems that all have the same title. It’s very much in the style of poets who’ve done books like that, but I’m deeply inspired by Mathias Svalina. The book I mentioned before, Destruction Myth, every poem in that book is titled Creation Myth, and they’re all sort of creation myths in their own way.

I’m currently reading his book Wastoid, which is a collection of sonnets, all titled Wastoid. Most of them, but not all, begin with the phrase "my lover is something or something else." So, for my new collection, the title kind of just sets a vibe for the poems. I don’t have any other strict rules beyond that, but I’m excited about it.

I’ve written a few and shared them with some people, and they seem to be resonating in a way that some of the prose poems in my first book did.

Noor: What’s on your bookshelf right now?

Delilah: Wastoid by Mathias Svalina. The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan. I’m about a quarter of the way through that one, and it’s incredible. I’m also partway through Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.


Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is calling on you to join the global fight for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people. Anywhere and everywhere you are, you can disrupt, advocate, speak out and refuse in small and big ways. Revolution until freedom. Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi

Delilah McCrea is a trans, anarchist poet living in Dearborn Michigan. She loves the NBA and knows the lyrics to every Saintseneca song. Her debut poetry collection is The Book of Flowers (Pumpernickel House Publishing, 2024). More of her work can be found at https://dtmccrea.wordpress.com/