Hatch

“Hatch couldn't be timelier . . . we should heed the calls of poets like Irish, who write with the oracular voices of old.” —Rain Taxi

“To read Hatch is to consider bodily autonomy, the push and pull of progress and regression, cycles of learning and mislearning and relearning. Irish confronts sexism and racism in the medical field, ego in science, misclassification and bias in tech . . . Hatch is striking and surreal, a strange fable uncomfortably rooted in truth, in which we face our history, our present, our history-in-the-making.” —Heavy Feather Review

“Jenny Irish’s vibrant use of language and imagery makes each page of Hatch sing. She can turn a sentence into a shiv, a paragraph into a punch. This collection is a deep, surprising, chilling — yet, somehow, also really fun — look at who we are as humans, at what we’ve done to the earth and each other, and at where the future may lead us (or, perhaps more accurately, how we as humans may impact the future of all life on the planet).” — Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns

“An entanglement of crosshatched vignettes that explore a violence unique to our species, Hatch provides a frightening premonition for a certain kind of gestating doom across generations—one that bears the symptoms of patriarchal inheritance, of racist inclinations in even our most “objective” technologies, and of our shared complicity in birthing cyclic atrocities. In this careful indictment, I read a startling awareness of the contours of our undoing—as Irish writes, “in the age of the metal womb, how quickly humans forget.” How brutal you are, Jenny. How true the viciousness of your brilliant book.” —Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl