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Imagine that humans have ceased to reproduce successfully. A giant—and eventually sentient—metal womb takes over human reproduction, gestating what she thinks of as “would-be-future-humans” until they are ready for harvesting. The hatch that opens her gestation tank remains closed, though. The metal womb has realized that the cycle of seeding and gestating and harvesting, seeding and gestating and harvesting, will continue: a cycle she never chose and cannot escape. Until she does escape, the “would-be-future-humans” still inside her, and she begins considering who is complicit in humanity’s near-extinction.
The premise of Jenny Irish’s outstanding new prose poetry collection, Hatch, is as delightfully speculative as it is nightmarishly urgent. Through the sentient metal womb’s “warbled sense of history, of cycles, of life,” readers are sloshed like “would-be-future-humans” between past, present, and future and the sites where they meet. We watch a fifth-grade science teacher bungle a water conservation lesson on Earth Day in 1988; in the next poem, we witness the extinction of silverfish at the hands of a fearful babysitter with a silver spoon. In what could just as well be the 19th century or today, we shudder at the male scientific establishment’s dismissal of women’s knowledge of their own bodies and the ways racism is baked into American infrastructure. What is, what could be, what has been: Irish shows us how humanity’s future is already haunted by its past and our current sociopolitical moment.
Irish and her former Arizona State University MFA student Colin Bonini recently discussed some of the most pressing questions in Hatch and Bonini’s own writing. How do we bear witness to the process of losing, rather than uncritically love what’s already lost? How do we hold the brutal realities of the climate crisis and systemic violence alongside hope and connection? And how do we hold each other through the vicious cycles of history and life?
The following conversation is an invigorating examination of what haunts us and what heals us.
— Elizabeth McNeill, Chicago Review of Books Daily Editor
Jenny Irish
One of my favorite things about language is how the vast majority of words have multiple meanings. When we describe something as haunting we are speaking to its lingering beauty, its resonance, but when we describe something as haunted we are saying it is beset by ghosts, or, in the case of a haunted person, showing signs of psychological torment. Colin, I’d describe your writing as both haunting and haunted in its portrayal of intense adolescent relationships and the unshakeable pain of their dissolution. Why are emotionally stunted men, who were open and expressive in their close childhood friendships, at the center of your fiction?
Colin Bonini
A couple years ago, I examined all my work and noticed most of my stories were retellings of each other. They all centered wounded men who either couldn’t identify what was eating at them, or otherwise couldn’t express those wounds through love or through language. The stories always ended the same. The guy would emotionally explode, basically, and commit an act of violence against himself or someone else. I got pretty good at telling that story, but it began to feel a little hopeless. Like, how many times can I show that dudes not dealing with their shit is self-destructive? How much of history is made up of men committing violence because they can’t face the reality of themselves?
Jenny Irish
I’ve had the privilege of reading some of those early stories. You’re right—of course. There was a pattern to their endings: an explosive action that suggested a character’s depth of emotion, but left them at the mercy of their personal ghosts, unable to put them to rest. It’s interesting to hear how those younger stories have helped your writing evolve from a place of exposing wounds to a consideration of how to heal them.
Colin Bonini
Thanks, Jenny. I wanted to stop retelling that story and instead show possibilities for change, and that meant leaning more into softness and vulnerability, which takes me back to your point about childhood friendships. It’s easier, for me, to access those emotions through depictions of childhood, when my characters are still being conditioned into the people they’ll eventually become. In those years, they’re still learning what’s acceptable and what’s not, what’s expected of them and why. They aren’t as scared of being kind, or of expressing love.
There’s an opposite side to all this, which is that when we’re young, we haven’t necessarily learned the bounds of our cruelty. I think a lot about Stephen King’s The Body, where the boys are incredibly cruel to each other, and have already embodied so much hate, but also make genuine attempts at consoling each other. These boys, they’ve already figured out, to some degree, that addressing a wound is the only way to heal it; they also know that exposing a wound makes it easier for others to hurt you even more. By the end, I think they all sort of cement themselves closed. The story isn’t just about the loss of innocence; it’s about a group of boys internalizing that, in order to grow up, they have to shut off a part of themselves. I think that story can work as a stand-in for a lot of (white) American masculinity narratives, which is pretty disheartening.
But what if the story went the other way? What if, instead of the boys deciding to shut themselves off, they leaned into the healing possibilities of those early connections? That’s what I’m trying to do with my work now. Through these early bonds, I’m trying to show what I feel some men have lost, or forgotten, or chosen to leave behind, then have them find it again.
Jenny Irish
Why is it easier to love what’s already lost?
Colin Bonini
What’s lost can’t change. When something’s gone, we have this snapshot of what it was, and that snapshot becomes the truth. Change can be terrifying; when something becomes static, it becomes a sort of comfort.
But we have to be critical of loving what’s lost. Unexamined nostalgia can lead so easily to falling in love with a skewed, idealized version of something that never really existed. Every time we remember something, we warp the memory a little bit. Do that enough times, and we create our own myths. Taken to extremes, nostalgia is a dangerous tool. This doesn’t mean we can’t love or mourn moments from the past, but we need to learn to love the best of our memories while acknowledging, and being critical of, more brutal realities.
Jenny Irish
I want to stay with the idea of haunted writing, but move away from metaphoric ghosts in relationships to a beloved literary subgenre: the haunted house story. Haunted house stories create a special sense of dread, because they are, at their core, about how the place where we should be safest—home—isn’t safe at all. You’re currently at work on a novel with a haunted house. Though it’s accurate, it also feels reductive to call the project a “haunted house book,” because there’s so much more than a building with a malevolent presence driving the narrative. How do you use the haunted house in your novel to access, illuminate, and explore its other concerns?
Colin Bonini
The haunted house opens so many possibilities because there are many ways for something to be haunted. A house can be evil in itself, sure, but a house can be haunted by its place, by its history, by its people, by its memory. The house in my novel is a combination of all these kinds of hauntings, which is a lot—perhaps, too much—to manage. The main drive, I think, is how my characters—particularly the men—are haunted by the ugly parts of the past they’re trying to outrun, and how those parts come roaring back when they return to the house. It’s what I’ve been saying: you can look back and acknowledge that, yeah, there were moments of love and tenderness, but hey, you better remember the rest, too. Otherwise, you’re gonna have some pretty serious ghosts.
What about you? Hatch isn’t a haunted house novel, but it’s definitely a haunting story. How do you see the role of “haunting” playing a role in the metal womb’s narrative?
Jenny Irish
I think of the metal womb as a haunted house. She has hundreds of people inside her, who are basically entombed alive. The metal womb doesn’t have the ability to “harvest” the children she gestates without human intervention, so they are born and die inside of her. Even after those initial trapped fetuses are fully grown and producing their own biological children inside her, the metal womb thinks of them as “would-be-future-humans,” in part because they will never leave her body and enter society. They’re inside her doing their own thing, involving a lot of behaviors that feel more animalistic than human.
Professor Nicholas Royle, in the introduction to his book The Uncanny, writes “…the beginning is already haunted.” Connected to what you’ve already said, Colin, about the breadth of possibilities in a haunting, I think the metal womb is also haunted by history. Yes, she’s a giant copper tank functioning as an artificial womb, but she’s the actual creation of generations of disdain for the science of climate change and an avoidance of addressing a slew of social issues–racism, toxic masculinity, right-wing extremism, class stagnation, and an attack on bodily autonomy that includes widespread failures to provide appropriate reproductive care–that have been not only tolerated, but encouraged. The metal womb is one embodiment of a home that isn’t safe. The America that she discovers is another.
Colin Bonini
Hatch carries jarring, talented contrast. The narrative centers a near-future dystopian solution to extinction, but also offers reflections on hope and connection. The metal womb proves consciousness to be both a gift and a curse. In a single poem, you juxtapose moments of wonder and possibility against images of a devastating reality. Hatch is a collection where the grotesque and the beautiful collide, but there’s never whiplash. How do you find a balance between these two extremes? What informs the connection you see between them?
Jenny Irish
Honestly, I feel like every day is a continuous collision of the grotesque and beautiful. I can’t drive from my house to my work without passing beautiful (allegedly very haunted) mountains and being on the road with big trucks with those decals of families, but instead of stick people, they’re made of guns, in a country that has a school shooting epidemic. Waking up, I’m with my husband and our dog, and I’m all fuzzy with love, and then I look at my phone. It could go either way, what I see first: something amazing or sickening. On Instagram, the first video could be a one hundred-year-old-sturgeon, or, a man digging through rubble with his bare hands to pull out a burned child. These are things that are happening simultaneously. Researchers have calculated that in states with total abortion bans, 64,000 pregnancies have been caused by rape. And one of my dear friends is planning a wedding. This is the world, every single day. I am sensitive to people denying that we live among daily inhumane horrors, and equally sensitive to people being chastised for continuing to live and having moments of joy in the midst of genocides and an American assault on its citizens’ bodily autonomy.
Colin Bonini
That’s so well said, and I admire your ability to hold both realities so fully. I found you were also able to embrace contrast in the syntax of the poems. Your sentences alternate between being masterfully complex and short, forceful, efficient. A favorite example of mine comes from “Nicholas Culpeper, Briefly,” which, after two long and winding sentences, ends simply with “Nicholas Culpeper (a relative) is someone else.” What are some of your strategies when it comes to playing with sentence structure, and what do you feel it adds to your work? How does it enrich your practice?
Jenny Irish
I want to see how much I can stuff into a little sack before the seams bust and everything spills. It’s like playing chubby bunny (the game with marshmallows). How many associated things can I fit into a piece before it becomes incoherent? I think all of my writing is dependent on associative relationships. It only works if I can cram, cram, cram. But, chubby bunny only works because people know the words they’re listening for. Direct statements can tidily summarize complex content. Structurally, they can be like a little mic drop: Boom Static.
Colin Bonini
How does the metal womb—bodiless; invented by and named after men in order to be “harvested”—allow you to explore the historic, systemic violence against women and their bodies?
Jenny Irish
When I’m writing, there are specific concerns, questions, and frankly, outrages, that are always there, in everything. In my own experience, class and gender have created certain expectations, and when I fail to conform, especially when I’m exceeding broad stereotypical expectations for a fat, big-titted, working-class girl, punishment is waiting. It’s important for me to write toward complexity and nuance—away from what feels like false binaries and gross reductivism. Violence takes up a lot of space in my writing because the world is violent. Writing about violence makes it necessary for me to write about class, and cycles of addiction, and gender roles, and how bullies and hatemongers come into positions of power at the micro- and macrolevels. Everything is impossibly connected, and I want to bring a recognition of that on the page. History determines the future.
Colin Bonini
“History determines the future” reminds me of that other proverb about the victors being the ones who write history. Do you see the metal womb’s escape as a victorious act? Or as a fruitless one?
Jenny Irish
Sometimes we just have to take what we can get. The metal womb gains consciousness. She escapes an endless cycle of forced pregnancy. She determines that she is she. She discovers an attraction to silos and wells. She dreams. But, she never actually gains autonomy over her own body. She has a lot of substantial gaps in her history. The more she learns, the more she comes to regret. So, I think her escape is a victory, regardless of how it ends. Sometimes we have to fight the battle we can’t win.
Colin Bonini
Earlier, you mentioned how Hatch is in conversation with a slew of social issues. One of the many strengths of Hatch is its success in drawing connections between different crises: environmental collapse, the dissemination of radical misinformation, the mass perpetration of gendered violence, the exploitation of disempowered groups… These connections seem intuitive to you and your practice, and part of why Hatch, though given a small container, feels vast in scope. Besides Hatch, what are some of the texts you would recommend to readers who want to research these kinds of intersections? What texts were integral to the making of Hatch?
Jenny Irish
It all begins with Stephen King. Seriously, I think we’re both readers and writers who were initially self-taught on Stephen King (though your writing has so many more of the consistent, strong, engaging features of his work than mine)? I’ve discovered that people love to dis Stephen King, but he’s a writer I know started many people on lifelong adventures as readers, and sparked their first interest in writing. The Body, which you mentioned for its content, is important to me because of how that novella chooses to illustrate connections and how skillfully it shows cause and effect over the course of the characters’ lives. History determines the future. (Sad trombone noise.)
Let’s talk about you. Your novel is both wildly imagained and draws on elements of regional lore grown from a seed of historical fact. Can you talk about how you transform facts into fiction? Do the porous boundaries between what is real, speculated, and created contribute to the haunted nature of your work?
Colin Bonini
Every time I meet someone else whose origins as a reader or writer are linked to Stephen King, I think of that scene from School of Rock where Jack Black and Joan Cusack are listening to “Edge of Seventeen” at a bar, and Jack Black is just like, “Yeah, Stevie!”
Fiction provides so much joy and imaginative possibility, but at the same time, my stories are entrenched in the histories of their settings. My book is set in the real city of Redlands, which means the story I’m telling is inseparable from the history of California and the people who live there. California’s history is filled with booms and busts, and like all of American history, the booms came at the expense of marginalized people with few to no rights. We see this all the way through Spanish missionaries forcibly converting the state’s Native peoples to now, with giant tech economies reliant on underpaid service workers who can’t afford housing. As writers, the way we tell these stories matters, and the ways our characters interact with these histories—or choose not to—are integral to that telling. (John Darnielle’s book Devil House is a great example.)
So, when you ask about transforming fact into fiction, it’s a fine line. Even if the stories we’re telling are “fiction,” there’s always going to be seeds of reality within them, and, eventually, the seeds we plant in fiction become the realities we understand. What I’m trying to do is make sure that the story I’m telling does history justice by planting the right seeds. My book is a story about people facing their pasts, and those pasts turn out to be more sinister, more haunted, than they remember. It’s a story about interpersonal hauntings, sure, but it’s also a story that couldn’t exist without the very real, very present hauntings that history has left us.
POETRY
Hatch
By Jenny Irish
Curbstone Press
Published March 15, 2024
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