Kristin Hatch’s the meatgirl whatever opens with two quotes in its epigraph. One, “Another way to use a large heart is to grind it,” is a line from M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf and captures—more than any single poem in the book—a way to read this peculiarly wrenching collection.
It isn’t a book that, at first glance, seems cohesive. The first twelve pages of the meatgirl whatever relate to, topically at least, the setting and situation of a young woman working in a restaurant, which at some turns feels like a fast-food joint and other times feels like a casual dining spot to which we never want to return. The pieces explore humorously—but always with a tension—working in this suffocating setting and the speaker’s interactions with the various characters who show up as both stereotyped (named for their role or job) and particular as Hatch turns them into persons and animate objects. The cast-list is long: “the walk-in,” “The Kitchen,” “host,” “the chefs,” “customers,” “kitchen boy,” “jerky,” “Boss man,” and “Bootleg-baby-chef-in-training.” As the mini-dramas of the restaurant unfold, it is clear the poems cannot merely be a record of tedium in a server’s world.
Rather, the speaker in these first twelve pages feels like she absorbs too much of what surrounds her –in the restaurant at least –and the reader understands this through Hatch’s intense utterances. Her phrasing is alternately lovely and offensive (or only so in their each being put side by side). The poems succeed at feeling both quiet and abrasive; in their lower-case, lyricism and a sometimes-used block paragraph format, they seem to hide a speaker who experiences life—every small bit of it—intensely. The restaurant begins to feel a too-bright, too-loud and too complicated place. And the language and fractured places in the poems, with their small erasures, start to stand in for the speaker’s own brokenness even when she is seemingly transparent. She interacts with others, but feels more, I’d guess, than anyone else in the room about a refrigerator, how she looks or who she loves, what anyone thinks of her. And the restaurant and its characters serve, so to speak, to show how the speaker does or doesn’t fit in; she stands far outside and she can even be funny about it from time to time, too.
Some of my favorite lines in the book come from “magix basket sundays,” a poem around a Sunday special at the restaurant: “how is everything in the world tasting. /wahwahwah, wahwah: cologne-boy nods, chew-chomp.” The lack of the appropriate punctuation in the question that becomes a statement is a way to see the speaker feeling far removed: the absurdity of the question and answer, the mix of what’s going on inside her and the restaurant-din. But she can play her role and fit in too: “bootleg-baby-chef-in-training just fries a bunch of them all at once/ & turns up some radio nascar shit./ we all want motown but he won’t” (9). It’s easy to go with this voice, its shortcuts and ampersands; its louder descriptions that bury the body behind the voice of the speaker in lower case, left out words and desire (she and her want get lost in the “we” here.)
In “hunger haven,” the poem is set in “the walk-in” where everything is “honest” and “it smells young like all the things you/ haven’t done yet.” Here, the speaker’s sent to the refrigerator for something or is escaping to be alone. The poem feels like a way to cool down from the burst of the opening pages. We get more of this large-hearted speaker when she describes herself:
in the walk-in, your arms cross in front of you for fake winter.
you can sometimes sit on an empty, upside-down tofu bucket.
this whole place is an animal
& here in the walk-in, you are crouched safely in its white,
panicked lung. (10)
Here, there is defensiveness; she sits alone and the world seems as if it could swallow her. It does, and she’s safe momentarily even if panicked.
What happens after “hunger haven” feels a departure; if we’ve moved from lemon wedges and bitches in the workplace, it’s to find a little more of the speaker we left crouched in the walk-in. The book shifts on page 13 to poems in different settings. One wonders if they were written before or after the first twelve pages, but it doesn’t matter. They become more personal; they are about other people the speaker knows and with whom she has relationships and even about characters from film, TV or fairy tales. In “narrative,” everything the speaker perceives is full up and hard to contain:
once, we were full of everyone of us. you guys
don’t even know.
life was cut flowers out loud.
of all things. of all truly
spectacular things (hot pepper, flight, cashmere robes)
we had more songs than all the songs.
for instance, the body all full of fall. the perfect
long of light. (44)
If the book’s cohesion could be understood this way, Hatch guides us—suckers that we are—into some crappy restaurant to subject us to its beautiful ridiculousness and the speaker at the center. What Hatch does with language is rough, and I believe her. Or it’s that feelings are rough and she turns them into words we want to hear. Buried in linguistic shortcuts, the smallness and loss that comes with taking away the words that don’t matter or do and leaving in or making the only ones that will help a reader feel and feel more, we get a sense of this book’s through-line. There’s something traumatic, in the end, about this collection. So much of what happens revolves around a throat or a neck. Knives or food. Eating and mincing words. In “accident,” the speaker’s dishes go flying and Hatch writes:
_________________fuck with his knife up like he was think-
ing up the thickness of my throat. jesus. i smile-dared. chef is scared
of sounds. chef likes it clean in the kitchen. i like to make my messes
there, my graffiti-wild, my sloppy songs. bloody hell he said, he chop-
chop said. chef’s a highway, a promise full of lonesome roads. (5)
In this book, it’s the lump in the throat—a feeling that you know everything is going to grind down your big heart—that doesn’t budge.
