If you were to open my copy of Jenny Irish’s prose poetry collection, Hatch, you would find margins filled with penciled half-thoughts and doodles of anatomically dubious fireflies. I’m not usually one to mark up a book, but Hatch works in mysterious ways, subtly shifting how we interact with the world.
Through linked prose poems set in a potential near-future, Hatch weaves the tale of a sentient metal womb and the one hundred “would-be-future-humans” growing inside her. We meet the womb via a series of disorienting, dream-like descriptions: “The metal womb does not have eyes and so she has never seen fireflies blinking above the tall grass of a field, but in her dreams—because she does dream—she has gathered fireflies in a glass jar that she carries in her makeshift hands.” And of course, “The metal womb does not have a clitoris, but she does have a conceptual grasp of clit.”
Irish’s poems tumble from one into the next, embracing a wry, pop-culture-infused sense of absurdism and whimsy, as evidenced by poems like “Toodle-oo, Kangaroo,” “Some Skynet Bullshit,” and “Sike!” Hatch’s references range from Cleopatra to Jellicle Cats, and squatters’ rights to Benjamin Franklin. But what may at first appear as a free-wheeling assortment of material gradually reveals itself as a closely-knit web—fibrous, dizzyingly connected.
Hatch’s concepts and imagery build on each other, overlap, return. Repetition, both within and across poems, is central to Irish’s worldbuilding. The poem “Time Travel” leads to “Time Travel, Again.” “The Unexpected” is soon followed by “Also Unexpected.” “Shame,” then “Shame, Still.” Some poems read almost like an excerpt from a textbook, cutting in their clarity. Information and ideas are revisited like a friend reentering a conversation after pausing to look something up, prove someone wrong, prove themselves right. The conversation has likely moved on, and yet it circles back, expands, reignites debate.
To read Hatch is to consider bodily autonomy, the push and pull of progress and regression, cycles of learning and mislearning and relearning. Irish confronts sexism and racism in the medical field, ego in science, misclassification and bias in tech. In the poem “Those Who Do Not Learn from History”:
… it occurs to the metal womb … that she has never had a choice but to be seeded and harvested, and seeded and harvested again, and that when her filtration system is fully flushed, when her tank is smooth and clean and disinfected … she will be seeded again, and then the harvest, and then the cleaning, and then the seeding, and then the harvest, and then, and then, and then …
Eventually, the metal womb escapes the “vast yellow field” where she has been “secured, staked down, pinned to the ground.” Newly “on the lam,” her sense of self grows, her recognition of her own dreams and desires. But this growth is not without its carnage. Having left the field, the metal womb finds she is unable to open her hatch and release the “would-be-future-humans” inside her, who “have divided into fierce factions that hunt one another.” As the situation within grows increasingly dire, outside:
The hunt continues for the missing metal womb. There is hope that it will be found (the metal womb’s pursuers do not acknowledge her as she, though that is how she thinks of herself), that its defects (consciousness) may be corrected, and that the project may be redeployed on a larger scale.
Though I won’t spoil the metal womb’s fate, by Hatch’s conclusion, she is “the last of her kind,” and we are prompted to consider their own complicity in a sticky web of societal successes and failures.
As prose poems, most entries in Hatch appear as a single block of text, some little more than a line or two, others spanning an entire page. This reliable, sturdy shape presents an illusion of order. But prose poems can be slippery things, boundary-blurring creatures. Irish’s sentences fly in short, sharp, shards, or in one swirling, breathless exhalation across many lines, here humorous and poignant, here visceral and grotesque. There is a deft levity to Irish’s prose, an openness to awe and wonder that prevents the tone from slipping irretrievably into cynicism or despair.
It is perhaps too simple to create any single, direct metaphor for the metal womb. She is spontaneous yet patterned, sci-fi yet organic, deeply knowing yet naive. She creates, and she houses destruction. She is lore, cryptid, prophecy, test. Her hatch is a barrier, an opening, a threshold, a passageway, “… a portal connecting outside to in.” In the same way, Hatch is striking and surreal, a strange fable uncomfortably rooted in truth, in which we face our history, our present, our history-in-the-making. And when confronted with the “corrosive elements” of life, Hatch tugs on a thread and asks: “… what then?”
Hatch, by Jenny Irish. Evanston, Illinois: Curbstone Press, March 2024. 88 pages. $18.00, paper.
Gina Thayer’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Cotton Xenomorph, trampset (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Sundog Lit, Five South, Lunch Ticket, Orca, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Gina holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently working on a collection of speculative stories. After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Gina now lives in Minneapolis with her partner and cat.
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