Hannah V Warren and I have been in the same PhD program for five years, so in addition to sitting in countless classrooms together, watching movies on each other’s couches, and carpooling around town, we have invested many hours discussing our writing. Still, I was surprised when I read her debut poetry collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress Publications, 2024), a book that is as innovative as it is heady.
A Mississippi-born writer, Warren offers a new approach to the Southern Gothic aesthetic. In Warren’s vision of the American South, the region’s violent history, decay, and abundant nature are felt painfully and pleasurably through the body. Her poems are sharp-toothed but inviting. They grapple with the wildness to come as we inch toward apocalyptic futures but also ask readers to share her sense of awe for the landscapes of the American South.
Through a series of emails, Warren and I discussed poetry that begins by observing something outside yourself, the expectations of being a Southern writer, why she’s drawn to apocalyptic themes, and her strong interest in finding beauty in the monstrous and grotesque.
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The Rumpus: This collection has evolved over the years. How did it begin? Which poems came first, and from what concerns or moods did they emerge?
Hannah V Warren: I suppose I can say these poems started with me and ended with someone else who is more like an alternate version of me. I started these poems around 2018 while I was living in Lawrence, Kansas. The poems changed so much over the years, and I did too. The first poems were dinosaur poems. The University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum holds the largest mosasaur found—a forty-five-foot-long Tylosaurus, an extinct marine reptile. Living outside of the Deep South for the first time, I was struggling to find connections to a landscape that didn’t feel like mine, and the museum gave me leeway to write into history—the bone wars, the Western Interior Seaway.
When I moved back to Georgia, where the landscapes felt both familiar and unfamiliar from my Mississippi adolescence and young adulthood, the Georgia Museum of Natural History became a focal point for connections among all these places. In Georgia, I started thinking about how the earth holds memory and we give language to it. It wasn’t until this point that my poems created their own speaker, someone with my memories but slant.
Rumpus: Do your poems often start by observing something outside of yourself?
Warren: Quite often, yes. I’m an external composer, and physical space formulates the crux of so much of my writing. The tangibility of familiar and unfamiliar places lends heavily to my imagery. I’m delighted when something already appears all swerve and grotesque before I ever reach the page. It’s funny, I never quite understood my normalized landscapes as embodiments of the Southern Gothic until I left Mississippi. Distance gave me a new lens. The natural imagery in these poems feels like home—azaleas, sunburnt muck, and swamp. Of course, outside of my own memory, the museum spaces created room for my poems to find firmer grounding: a visual link.
Rumpus: At what point did you realize you had a collection on your hands rather than stand-alone poems? What first gave this collection its unique shape?
Warren: During the height of the pandemic lockdown, I spent hours circling nearby neighborhoods and the vacant downtown streets in Athens, Georgia. I drove to nearby small towns and paced their county roads and hiking trails. I climbed up and down cliffs and waterfalls. I grew obsessed with how a few relatively forgotten places in Georgia frame their histories, causing them to glow a bit brighter but purposefully concealing or rewriting pasts to hide histories of enslavement and expulsion. Out of this constant wandering came “Estranged South,” the longest poem in this collection. Pages and pages of history were congealed into this set of connected pieces. I realized the concerns I had in the poem—girlhood, physical and cultural landscapes, enfleshed histories—appeared in my dinosaur and natural history poems, which were also in the process of becoming more and more apocalyptic. Something like and unlike a narrative spun throughout the poems and coalesced and assembled.
Rumpus: The first section of Slaughterhouse seems to be about the weight of the past. You invite us into a natural history museum, a “jurassic wilderness” where we explore the dynamic between the speaker, a young girl, and her mother as they tour exhibits of dinosaur skeletons. Whose histories were you thinking about in this first part?
Warren: We have such strange relationships with our bodies—both familiar and estranged. The speaker’s mother keeps a close eye on the speaker’s changing body as she matures, always instructing her on form and poise, always imposing her ideals. If she could, she’d deconstruct and re-form her daughter. As the speaker pulls apart and rebuilds skeletons, she feels the same actions from her mother. Disassemble. Re-form. Repeat until the pieces slot together, the same but changed. “Like mother, like daughter”? I often consider lineages when I compose—poems that influence my own, the cultural ties that bind us, the way child-rearing refracts and splinters into the next generation. The speaker’s adolescence coexists with her desire to find answers or escape in someone or something else’s lineage, which, I’m realizing now, is the same thing I sought when I started composing these poems.
Rumpus: Slaughterhouse does become more apocalyptic as it goes, more concerned with abandonment and decay. Where does this interest in apocalyptic themes come from?
Warren: As a woman who grew up along the Gulf Coast, I feel like the apocalypse is in my blood. If it wasn’t a fire and brimstone sermon on Revelation(a book in the Bible), it was a hurricane whipping through shingles and tin. I remember sitting in church as a child and shivering at the idea of hell, and something about heaven was equally horrifying. I think a lot about major and minor apocalypses in my work and in the media I study critically.
Most apocalypse literature fixates on the global—the alien invasion, the pandemic, the nuclear fallout. I’m drawn to those, of course. In global apocalypses, social devastation allows for a restructuring of gender roles, precarity, but I find myself drawn to local apocalypses, as well, both within and outside of large-scale disaster: the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Trail of Tears, for example. These events affected the entire world but didn’t change the day-to-day life of every single person on earth. Literature reflects these local devastations within larger, global apocalyptic renderings—I’m thinking specifically about Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, which makes metaphorical connections between a global apocalypse and Indigenous boarding schools. My interest lies in this connection to our truths, the various layers of The End embedded in apocalypse media. Often the apocalypse represents a very real fear. Slaughterhouse starts as a gendered apocalypse then expands. A ripple becomes a wave.
Rumpus: In your poem, “Divinations,” you write, “[w]e live with the horrors of our own bodies / ornamented machines gnawing into the future.” These lines seem to encapsulate the type of apocalypse you’re interested in, which seems more personal.
Warren: Personal apocalypse rings true. My background is in monster theory, and monstrosity slips in and out of these poems, informing how I think about the grotesque body. I oriented these poems to follow a linear, albeit disrupted, timeline. A young girl discovers all the ways she doesn’t fit and doesn’t desire to fit expectations of her body. The more she diverts from these expectations, the more apocalyptic her experiences become. She becomes a monstrous object. That object becomes abject. Is this bodily transformation a risk or a gentle promise to outlive an ending? I’m not sure.
Rumpus: Do you intentionally invite grotesque and monstrous aesthetics into your depiction of nature, too? Bones are abundant in your poems, as are mold and mildew, and your descriptions of nature can sometimes walk a line between beauty and menace. For example, you also feature sunburned tulips, lawless dandelions, a quail who “splits her beak and calls for her young.”
Warren: Oh yeah, absolutely. In my poetry, I search for new ways of creating discomfort through language, not only in descriptions but also through cleaving individual words that resist cohesion. At my core, I’m a poet who loves the page and the way words look when shoved together or ripped apart. I suppose I’m always trying to find a language that matches the mimetic visual. Mold and mildew are patched and dripped and stretched and smeared and slathered. As we do with a Rorschach test, we can look at the green scum atop a pond and create patterns. I want language to evoke images unimaginable to me, to take it and run with it. From the grotesque-ification of traditionally desirable objects like tulips and dandelions, I hope to capture something similar, to blur the lines between beauty and sublimity. And, perhaps, to lend this same blurring to bodies traditionally considered grotesque.
Rumpus: Do you ever feel discomfort when you’re out in nature? Do you consider nature as menacing or monstrous as you camp or hike?
Warren: I have so many beefs with early aestheticians—Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and their ilk—but they’ve informed our contemporary understanding of sublimity, which encompasses much of what I feel on solo backpacking trips. Nature is scary-beautiful, especially in the backcountry. I always carry a simmering fear of what I’ll find or what will find me alone on the trail: bears, storms, men.
A couple years ago, I awoke in my tent in the early morning hours at the sound of a treefall. I listened as it cracked, crashed, and rolled down the mountain. It was close enough to vibrate the ground beneath me. When it was bright enough outside to see, I couldn’t even find the tree that fell. The night was stormy, and the woods were afresh with upturned trees and downed limbs.
I don’t see nature as menacing on its own, but I’m incredibly interested in eco-monstrosity—a sentient nature that reacts violently to climate change and other human-caused devastations. I think about eco-monstrosity a lot when hiking, and some of that writing infects Slaughterhouse, especially in the second and third sections where the speaker’s world starts to unravel.
Rumpus: What is it like being a writer from the South? What are the expectations and realities that come along with it?
Warren: Being from the South is such an intricate, intoxicating, and often treacherous experience. I love Mississippi. It’s home. For many of the same reasons I love Mississippi, I’ve grown to love Georgia as well. It’s the landscape familiarity, the accents, the regional stories. We’ve all heard the jokes about Southern education, Southern dialects, Southern poverty, Southern religion. To be from the Deep South is to have people from other states, other countries, other continents ask you about rumors and histories with a concerned or amused set to their mouths. Kissing cousins. Segregated schools. Violence in Atlanta and New Orleans. Shoeless children. At home, we think we have such distinct regional differences that we identify people by their county. I’m from Jones County—someone from Greene County or Wayne County wouldn’t understand me. Of course, it’s not actually true, but humans love categorization—that’s how we make monsters.
While writing Slaughterhouse, I thought a great deal about what binds Southern women across racial, social, and economic divides. No one can claim the same experiences, but many of us from my region can claim a familiarity that comes with breathing the same air, living through Hurricane Katrina, and missing the smell of pine. Alongside all that comes a low-grade fever that settles in our throats either in praise or rejection of religious expectations, the ones that so often lay down rules for women’s bodies.
Rumpus: Do you feel any duty to correct misconceptions about the South in your work?
Warren: Only in terms of how people view the South as an abject land mass, separate from the United States. So many folks from other regions tend to think of the Southeast as a lawless place with histories separate from American values. Just as it’s impossible to group people in large stereotypes so does this place resist categorization. The South is richly diverse in culture and landscape. My own place within it is simply a pebble on a beach.
Rumpus: If I can take your title, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales, very literally for a moment, are there old wives’ tales you wanted to slaughter by writing this book?
Warren: I’m wildly fascinated by old wives’ tales as cultural remnants. I see them as methods of survival, though often factually unreliable. Traditionally, old wives’ tales provided medical advice or slivers of guidance to help women negotiate marital bliss or divorce, childbirth or abortion, gardening, etcetera. Heaped beneath the lore is a kernel of caretaking, of women exchanging advice on daily living, of therapy in a place where therapy isn’t acceptable or available. I wouldn’t mind slaughtering some of the misogyny-based rituals that go along with these slips of knowledge, but the core ambitions of old wives’ tales have probably helped keep a lot of women safe and alive.
Rumpus: What’s something that gives you joy as you’re writing, and what’s something that comes slower or with less ease?
Warren: My poems come in a lot of stages, and they nearly always start on paper—a small, helter-skelter notebook full of leaves, dirt, postcards, and line snippets. My ultimate joy in the writing process is transcribing poems from the page to a digital format. Here, I revise as I go. My jumbled language becomes something that looks like a poem. It’s a discovery process—an unearthing, an archeological dig. Bones from elsewhere might fit here, or they might not. I try out new lines, I take them out. I fiddle with line breaks, repetition, internal rhyme, and blank space. After all this shifting, I leave the poem to pickle for a while.
In the late editing stages of Slaughterhouse, I discovered the most complicated part of writing, for me, is assessing individual poems as part of a whole. I tend to fall in love with specific words—seed, slick, sanguine, saccharine—and I pop them into poems with joyful abandon. It’s not until I’m faced with my manuscript that I realize how weird it is to use the word saccharine five times. Not weird in a good way but weird in a lack-of-vocabulary way. This fine-combing is not distasteful or unappealing, but it’s much slower and requires a more meticulous eye for cohesion.
Rumpus: What are you working on now?
Warren: At least five projects, always. I’m in the revision process for a new poetry collection that’s more personal than Slaughterhouse but reaches for many of the same themes in terms of women’s bodies and the Southern Gothic. I spent a year in Germany recently, and this new book connects my personal experience with growing up in the Deep South to incredibly weird European Gothic landscapes, cities, and literature, with special attention to my time in the Black Forest. I’m thrilled to navigate the process of translating German poet Alexandra Bernhardt’s work as well. We share many of the same poetic and thematic fascinations, and I love the linguistic hula hooping required to translate her work for English readers. I have a little project on Sylvia Plath brewing, too, but it’s in very early stages.
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Author photograph courtesy of the author
