Hatch

Groundbreaking feminist poems featuring an artificial womb and an apocalyptic future

The prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species. This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. More intimately, Hatch considers questions about how motherhood and its cultural expectations shape female identity. Working with avant strategies, Irish crafts a speculative feminist narrative, excavating and reexamining the aspects of the American experience that should have served as a call to action but have not. Part elegy and part prophecy, Hatch warns of a possible future while speaking to the present moment.