Alexander Pyles

Review: Jenny Irish, Hatch (Northwestern University Press, 2024)

Jenny Irish’s new collection of poetry, Hatch, is remarkable for each poem within, but the true revelation is in its entirety. Borrowing the title for a moment, the understated message of the work hatches into your unconsciousness. Irish explores many thoughts on women, childbirth, and motherhood that the larger society and culture shy from. Hidden in the various lines of the prose poetry, like in the piece “Hitchbot Was Dependent on the Kindness of Strangers,” she offers both small accusations and pleas to the reader. The collection emerges as a fragmented narrative centering a metal womb and her awakening of self and what part she (Irish uses female pronouns for the metal womb throughout) plays in the slow collapse of human civilization.

The collection takes place in a post-apocalyptic space, sometime in the ambiguous future, and, while most appear to be taken from the metal womb’s perspective,  various interlude poems, such as “Hand-Waving Pseudoscience” and “The Scientist, ” take that of the scientists who created her, while other more macroscopic poems like “Shame, Still” and “Fear-Based Responses” establish the larger movements in this bleak world.  These facets of the story combine to illustrate the historical context of birth and its fraught ownership between women, men, and medical practitioners. Combined with references varying from cellular memory theory to historical figures like Nicholas Culpeper, who wrote a sixteenth-century manual on childbirth, the breadth of human experience is here in fleeting wisps.

Of course, the subtext can hardly be termed so in Irish’s rendering, with the biting snap of such lines as:

Few remember the short-lived attempt to shift from the concept of Mother Earth to Lover Earth, a campaign motivated by the belief that the transition could spark an environmental awareness in a specific kind of man who viewed motherhood as a service position, underpinned by sacrifice, but who toward a lover might feel a greater obligation, if not to care for than to upkeep, as this specific kind of man viewed his lover’s appearance as a direct reflection upon himself.

This section from “Tartar Sauce All Down His Chin” highlights the dark undercurrent that swirls both outside the metal womb and within her. The violence of men who seek to own and dominate comes into increasingly sharp focus as the poems progress. 

The metal womb’s creation was a solution to declining births and humanity’s general fear of extinction, despite it being partly their fault. She personifies all of the panics and social moralizing that go into motherhood. She fears her children will not have “all the things that mammalian-live-birth would-be-future-humans have.”  This line highlights Irish’s particular choice to have the metal womb refer to her offspring as would-be-future-humans. The word “baby” does not enter the lexicon when in the metal womb’s perspective.

Offering not only a cultural critique of motherhood, childbirth, and the medical practices that historically only oppressed women, rather than fully helping their health or even survival, Irish presents an impassioned and deeply personal appeal for empathy toward this metal womb. It is almost as if those feelings of empathy could develop—maybe they would extend to women as well. This view may be too cynical as to what Irish was intending, but when set against this line from “Communication Breakdown,” ‘If only she [the metal womb] could trust that any human would offer help instead of harm, she would accept it,’ it doesn’t offer much possibility for speculation.

Irish has given us something exceptional and cutting. I wanted the metal womb to be happy, despite that not being her lot. Hatch presents a singular example of how poetry can be a statement of beauty while also providing a catalyst for re-thinking our commonly held positions. Readers will come for the irresistible premise of a sentient artificial womb but stay for the cultural critique that seeks to undermine the foundational misogyny that still plagues all of us.