The Meatgirl Whatever

Winner of the National Poetry Series.

The poems in Kristin Hatch’s debut collection ooze with the viscus of shattered reality. Bodily, almost animalistic, they flirt with apocalypse, accumulate like diary entries from a madman’s kitchen where knife blades hover near the jugular. This is a documentary, writes K. Silem Mohammad, who selected this book for the National Poetry Series, or these poems are promotional cartoon avatars, installations of a longer, live-action Emmy-winning series in which glee and melancholy, revulsion and beauty, lyric and satire, living flesh and chopped-up meat combine in sinister gurlesque fantasia. A terrifying and necessary first book.

From annunciation:

bent, he talked me through all my tied, big like i was kansas or a diagram sketched with arrows pointing to my special parts with trick and murder spelled out in clean, legible type. his documentary voice uncled at my ankles.

my legs folded back for him & he’d say my mouth was a hauntbag. he could take the willows from my lungs. i hated himbut i begged for it in the underhang & the bad would bang into bird shapes & every time my ugly became less ugly, ours. for a while, the mirrors were too thick with it to see through.

after he left, i picked at my at my toes & tried to get ancient. stungdumb, & gnarled against that autumn, i sat barefoot to imagine his arm hair–all of it shuttering like wheat in a stormfield–featherlight little marys–a legless army, aghast at god & beginning to show.

Kristin Hatch has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and Indiana Review. Her chapbook, through the hour glass, is forthcoming from CutBank and is about the soap opera Days of Our Lives.