[Northwestern University Press; 2024]
The heart of Hatch is a submarine-like womb—artificial, industrial, and on the lam. This inventive collection of prose poems by Jenny Irish has, in its metal womb, a central character whose fledgling consciousness reveals in subtle ways how easily we can misread humanity’s impulses and intentions, its impact on the world, and its trajectory through failing ecosystems. This character’s journey—a haphazard grand tour after achieving consciousness and building herself legs and arms—is embedded with and interrupted by commentary on medical, political, and social systems that have created the metal womb’s degraded environment. The metal womb’s attempts to fulfill the surrogate service for which she was designed, while also being allowed to exist outside her lonely cycle, bend toward tragedy in a future world where human populations are decimated, and the children she has carried for years offer in their cannibalistic birth quite possibly a fate worse than extinction.
While the central themes of Hatch are heavy, the poems are often phrased with a straightforward lightness that makes the collection easily navigated. Throughout Hatch, Irish expresses complex scientific ideas simply and clearly. Her exploration of the theory of memory transfer between mother and child avoids terminology like microchimerism and instead offers imagery like that of fireflies moving about a field. How else to explain a metal womb achieving consciousness other than her receiving five years’ worth of dreams from the five hundred “would-be-future-humans” she has carried? Similarly, Irish defines fireflies’ characteristic bioluminescence not only from its Greek etymology of “living light,” but through comparison, in the poem “Faith,” as something:
too exquisite to capture in words and events that demand a person believe without question, without thought, without consideration of anything but hope.
As she achieves consciousness, the metal womb conflates her future-humans with fireflies in a glass jar, realizing in “The Unexpected” that “she was emptied with intent, a ghost vessel for lack of a crew, the field of tall grass dark, absent of all the little blinking lights.” Having no choice to be continually seeded and harvested, the metal womb leaves her field without the knowledge that fireflies kept inside a glass jar are doomed.
Alongside the metal womb’s creation narrative, Irish weaves historical and future stories of scientists, doctors, technicians, and hacks all concerned with bringing new life into the world. The father of English midwifery, Nicholas Culpeper, is featured in several prose poems, as is an unnamed female science intern, in the same future timeline as the metal womb, whose lab works with animal embryos in some hope of avoiding species extinctions. In Hatch, the history of birthing is dangerous and bloody, and complications too often lead to violence, such as in “Assisted Birth in the Nineteenth Century,” where, to remove an stuck infant, “the choice would be made to take the knotted bundle of infant and snap its stick-thin clavicles and dislocate the little bird wings of its shoulders, damaging the new child into something foldable that could be made small enough to pull free.” Contemporary birth, too, has its dangers, as Irish makes clear in “Shame,” a brief poem about a scientific review of births in Florida that “determined that Black newborns are three times more likely to die than their white counterparts when under the care of a white doctor.” From a family of French barber surgeons who hid their invention of obstetric forceps to future men, in “Potent,” who think vampires “are responsible for the stillbirths whittling down every mammalian species,” Irish considers the multi-faceted progress of bearing and bringing forth life and finds it shocking and truly human, unaware of its many blind spots.
The prose poems in Hatch vary in length and subject matter, and Irish’s use of juxtaposition, particularly of imagery within a poem though also through poem placement, effectively creates tension in the collection. A particularly strong example of this technique is seen in the conclusion of the aforementioned “Assisted Birth in the Nineteenth Century,” where Irish compares pre-cesarean birthing options for a stuck child to “closing time at a BBQ joint in Lockhart, Texas, where it’s All-You-Can-Eat and eating with your hands is encouraged.” Her concluding description of that meal so clearly resembles poor birthing outcomes, readers cannot help their sense of discomfort. Irish also uses repetition—of voices, images, and, at times, sentence structures—to create poetic cohesion in the collection. In “Blub…Blub…Blub…” nearly all sentences begin with “It is not . . .” until suddenly, a percussion of “it is” statements brings the poem to its uncertain end. And throughout Hatch, fireflies appear not only as themselves, but also as the metal womb’s trapped children and an expression of unnamed hope that slowly goes dark.
Near the end of Hatch, Irish includes several prose poems that internalize the struggle new mothers face when handed a “tiny guttering life, with such overwhelming helplessness and total dependency,” something human mothers have forgotten about in the age of the metal womb. The poem “How Quickly We Forget” offers readers the chance to imagine a world where babies gestated in the metal womb leave fully able “to wipe their own bottoms, pour their own juice, tie their own shoes, sleep through the night, access cartoons, monitor their own screen time.” The poem’s second half rejects the idea of natural motherhood with a wry scene of future-females having to adjust to carrying their own babies and birth them in total dependency once the metal womb disappears: “It will come to you naturally, they say, and they are so confident that they are not in the least bit concerned when they leave her all alone with the baby—with its cries and its claws.” Irish continues, in “Au Contraire, Mon Frère,” to dispel the notion of natural motherhood. Using short sentences and repetitive phrasing, Irish captures the inherent disorientation and messiness of new motherhood:
The baby screams and screams and screams. The baby is screaming. The baby keeps screaming. The baby is still screaming. The baby will not stop screaming.
When facing situations that she has been told she will know how to manage, the new mother questions all aspects of her abilities and self. To call the doctor is to open oneself to potential ridicule. To put a screaming baby down is quite possibly not allowed. And the aching, tired new mother “is more afraid in this moment than she has ever been.” What isn’t to be feared in carrying a child and caring for a newborn, when every action has a potential harm? What isn’t to be feared when a newborn child so upends a woman’s very definition of self?
And what then, of the conscious metal womb, carrying her last cargo, wandering the countryside without the means to open her hatch and release her trapped progeny? In “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth,” the womb rests in a deep ravine behind a mental health facility. Here, the womb listens to women whose minds have gone wild, recognizing those she has birthed only when “she feels them reject her from themselves.” And what of the trapped children, turned cannibal inside the metal womb as the only way to survive such captivity? Once the metal womb degrades enough and cracks open, as suggested in “Could God Make a Rock So Big,” will they “build the great bloody altars of their civilization in the lost streets . . . will they do it as an act of worship of her—their mother—their great creator, She from whom the first life was ever hatched?” In response to our current environmental damage and threats to female autonomy, Jenny Irish’s Hatch presents one possible future that ensures the survival of the human species. That readers may wonder if the survival of our species is ultimately worth the loss of our humanity speaks to the strength of her questioning.
Lisa Higgs, a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grantee, has published three chapbooks, most recently Earthen Bound (Red Bird). Her reviews and interviews can be found online at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review, the Adroit Journal, and the Colorado Review.
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