We present the first determination of the hadronic decays of the lightest exotic $JPC=1-+$ resonance in lattice QCD. Working with SU(3) flavor symmetry, where the up, down and strange quark masses approximately match the physical strange-quark mass giving $m\pi \sim 700$ MeV, we compute finite-volume spectra on six lattice volumes which constrain a scattering system featuring eight coupled channels. Analytically continuing the scattering amplitudes into the complex energy plane, we find a pole singularity corresponding to a narrow resonance which shows relatively weak coupling to the open pseudoscalar--pseudoscalar, vector--pseudoscalar and vector--vector decay channels, but large couplings to at least one kinematically-closed axial-vector--pseudoscalar channel. Attempting a simple extrapolation of the couplings to physical light-quark mass suggests a broad $\pi 1$ resonance decaying dominantly through the $b1\pi$ mode with much smaller decays into $f1\pi$, $\rho \pi$, $\eta \prime \pi$ and $\eta \pi$. A large total width is potentially in agreement with the experimental $\pi 1(1564)$ candidate state, observed in $\eta \pi$, $\eta \prime \pi$, which we suggest may be heavily suppressed decay channels.