BOOK REVIEW

Mothers’ Bloodlines, Daughters’ Bones: Hannah V Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales

By Morgan Richardson Dietz     October 31, 2024




Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales
Hannah V Warren
Knoxville: Sundress Publications (2024)
87 pp. $12.99 (paperback)

The experience of reading Hannah V Warren’s debut poetry collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales, is something akin to finding that wildflower seeds have rooted in your chest, sprouting painful blooms up along your esophagus. It is gorgeous and grisly. It is difficult to swallow.

Exceedingly place-based, Warren’s writing evokes the particular stickiness of the South: the heavy wet air, one’s hands after eating a peach, and the difficulty in leaving it. (Originally from Mississippi, Warren has also lived in Georgia and, most recently, Alabama.)

you’ll slice out your haunted tongue & the vulgar homesickness
gluing you to a place that’s nothing more than silted fissures

Homesickness, rather than a condition of leaving, becomes one of staying, “gluing you to a place.” These kinds of upendings characterize each of the collection's four sections: Dinosaurs, Divinations, Apocalypses, and Biographies. Warren ruptures preconceptions of home, of trauma, of patriarchy and tenderly resets them as one would a broken bone. In “Estranged South,” the longest poem of the collection, she writes that:

elastic breath clings to a windowpane
where a sick girl tugs on dark curtains
& kisses the cloud shapes

silent and wine-heavy in her vacant home
your mother tucks her hands in the soil
grows roots from her fingertips & warns
thunderstorms away

Breath that “clings,” placed alongside the girl’s palpable longing to be elsewhere, evokes a stale, cloistered atmosphere. But the lines that follow imply a kind of embodied connection to the earth, joined, in flesh to “your mother.” At first glance, this joining would seem a stark contrast to the “vacant home,” yet both are close, dark, and damp. In pairing these seemingly disparate images, a central tension of the collection emerges: one may feel entrapped by one’s home while simultaneously experiencing a powerful, material connection to it. As Warren narrates the physical landscape of the “Estranged South” throughout the collection, readers encounter these linked sensibilities: bitter entrapment and profound rootedness.

A distinct blend of formal offerings, Slaughterhouse includes, among others, prose poetry, excerpts—such as a 1614 discourse on serpents by John Trundle, which mirrors Warren’s own intrusive “note to the reader”—and a found poem assembled from the author’s own words. Entitled “Biographies,” this entry is perhaps the best metonym for the book, as its placement near the end suggests. It encapsulates the way that Warren draws readerly attention to the collection itself; words and phrases are gathered up as river rocks and moss and animal pelts and ginkgo seeds and jawbones. It is an metapoetic entry into the authorial process, the taking of a phrase from a museum plaque or an 1839 edition of The Magazine of Natural History. Readers are addressed as readers, and the collection is manifestly collected, “a cornucopia of southern gothic materials.”

In the first section, “Dinosaurs,” Warren gives voice to bones, granting personhood to what might otherwise be considered objects and disrupting the colonialist project of artifact collection in which pieces are yoked together by violence. Instead, to use Stacy Alaimo’s term, Warren reconfigures the museum as a “trans-corporeal” space, which Alaimo defines as “a literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature. [...] Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions.”

Though trans-corporeality is commonly discussed in the context of natural imagery—forests, streams, the plunging of a mother’s hands into soft soil—Warren’s natural history museum places the lyric “I” in conversation with the living/previously living world. In Slaughterhouse, this contact zone is also necessarily gendered: a conversation not only about enmeshed ecology, but about identity formation in girlhood.

Warren’s speaker, a young woman, begins to understand the ways she, and her body, have been silenced, seemingly finding comfort in the physicality of voice: the jaws, the teeth, the throat, the esophagus of another creature. Warren never allows us to forget that voices come from bodies. Women’s bodies, so often treated as monstrous—bloody, fat, uncontrollable—are compared to fearsome dinosaurs, with massive, unignorable vocal cords to match. Addressing readers in second person, Warren tells us how:

you stare into the widejawed throat of allosaurus see
            how her tongue once pressed her top palate

rapture of warm bones & acrylic polymers
barely more than juvenile, her body is similar to
yours not quite formed somehow unformed
                                           in the ways that matter most to her mother

The recognition is obvious, though nascent (“her body is similar to yours not quite”). It offers a kind of protection from the unnamed danger lurking across each page of this collection: the violence committed against women, physical and psychological, sexual and religious, by the people closest to them. Indicated variously by a “husband’s dull shouting,” a sister’s erased bruises, or a mother advising a daughter “how to remain pure on a bed of / glass,” these threats stalk the speakers. Their identification with great, gaping jaws and sharp claws augurs a threat of violence in return.

Part Two, “Divinations,” establishes Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales as also a collection of lineages: the cruelty passed down by mothers to daughters, the pteranodon and her fossilized eggs (a lineage cut short), the apocalyptic artifacts of a family’s “left-behinds,” and, of course, the old wives’ tales. If old wives’ tales are part of an oral tradition, Slaughterhouse is both a descendant of those lineages and a fierce interrogation of them; the form of the old wives’ tale functions both to disseminate patriarchal beliefs but also to protect from their harm. In “divining the future through autocannibalism,” Warren warns:

the lines on your hand will lie to you. they’ll promise tender
apologies & a vegetable garden & a husband with soft hair

The superstitions passed on from mothers to daughters, from girls to friends, uphold a compulsive heterosexuality, instilling in young girls the idea that marriage to “a husband with soft hair” will be the most notable thing about them, the most prominent line. But in “a collection of old wives’ tales that live on your body,” we also find power in superstition. One line directs:

spill salt to kill your husband.

These wives’ tales are coupled with allusions to items like the dowsing rod, which Martin Luther deemed “worthy of occultism” and bodies that contain “witchcraft.” Together, the references evoke a shared cultural memory: the violence committed against women who are too intelligent, too sexual, too uncontrollable, distilled in the image of a woman burned at the stake.

In “Apocalypses,” the collection’s third section, the gendered violences of earlier poems expand to encompass a larger devastation but are not forgotten. Readers witness families fractured by catastrophe, such as the brother who built walls around his resources or a mother’s death. In “all the lights go out at once,” a family comes upon:

fleshed mashes layer the riverbanks. their soft hair burning,
smoke rising. your sister asks why they’re all women, why
the men dousing them with gasoline wear hooked masks.
you say you don’t know, but you probably do. women were
first to die, their nakedness bloated & displayed on the
news. it was in their blood. they found it in their blood.

Blood serves to connect “Apocalypses” with earlier sections of the collection, drawing the meaning of blood relations into conversation with dystopian danger and asking readers to consider: how have the lineages from mother to daughter been corrupted, pounced upon by those who wish to further their own narrative? In “The Hurting Kind,” Ada Limón writes:

Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children,
a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?

I told my friend D that and she said, What if you want to kill
your own bloodline, kill like it’s your job?

In a similar vein, Warren asks, “if you rip out your womb with your hands / & feed it to wild dogs, will you survive evolution?” Each writing in the interrogative, Limón and Warren investigate lineage. With the images of this final section, burning women and wombs fed to wild animals, Warren draws a firm bloodline between the casual misogyny of earlier sections and the catastrophes of her final poems. The blood of kinship, we can imagine, becomes also the “shameful” blood of menstruation, as a mother instructs her daughter on the ways she must control her body; the blood sucked by mosquitos in the swampy summer, here, becomes the latest reason women are immolated on a burning pyre. The lineage is unmistakable: these final horrific scenes are the progeny of current events.

As Warren reminds us, “the only border between you & what’s out there is your / body.” But in Slaughterhouse, she also consistently erodes that border, imbuing human bodies with the more-than-human. Rather than dichotomies that cannot be reconciled, Warren treats the body and world as contact zones: resulting sometimes in destruction and other times in creation. As we spin into oft-gendered global, local, and personal apocalypses, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales reminds us to live in the discomfort, to feel the ache of these devastations in our ever-decaying bodies, but also to survive, even if it means collecting protections—serrated teeth and talons, especially if it means yielding to a howling wildness.

​Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales by Hannah V Warren

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MORGAN RICHARDSON DIETZ is an assistant teaching professor of English at Northern Arizona University. She earned her PhD from the University of Georgia, where she began her current book project (then dissertation) entitled, Political Portions: Women and Hunger in Contemporary South Asian Fiction. Her work has been published in Postcolonial Interventions, The Explicator, Studies in the Novel, and The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.