Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales

Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales 

By Hannah V. Warren 

Sundress Publications, 2024  

Paper: 16.00 

Genre:  poetry, speculative fiction 

Reviewed by Laura Secord 

Hannah V. Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales, winner of the 2024 Whirling Prize, is speculative poetry at its richest. Spanning millennia, Warren’s book uses lyricism, research, and imagination to create a brave, beautiful, and disturbing connection through time.   

In her “note to the reader,” Warren asks us, “What do you invent when your bulbous flesh melts deep into swamp water?” Then she takes us on a journey through time, evolution, extinction, and transformation. Sci-fi and paleontology fans will latch onto this book in identification.   

Voiced by an elementary-aged girl who finds fascination and obsession with the shuttered dinosaur exhibit in her small Southern coastal town 

“This museum is a Jurassic wilderness where the grizzly parts 

are artificial craters  imitation nectar and polyp detail 

 

you are here so often you sometimes forget 

all ferns aren’t machine snipped echoes 

made from the same melted plastic 

as the moldy gumball machine at the front desk.” 

Warren organizes her collection into three, chapter-like sections: “Dinosaurs,” “Divinations,” and “Apocalypses.” In a novel-in-verse format, the speaker describes three characters: 

1. Your mother, “you find your mother inside// the museum boasts 12 visitors a week/ & she doesn’t want to be here// she sings to you/ a faceless whisper that vibrates your jaw”; 

1. Your sister, “barely more than juvenile, her body is similar to yours/ not quite formed somehow unformed…”; and  

1. Yourself, who, “bend(s) a gap between your shoulder blades/ render(s) your marrow thin & supine… // reach(es) for the allosaurus’ carved snaggleteeth//  … if you pull hard enough/ your skeleton could come apart/ synthetic medullary bone tissue seeping”  

Growing up in a world where the extinct have been revived in acrylic and polymer falseness, where the great animals are in disrepair, our speaker memorizes, “…the words of every inscription/ …you could be poisonous if you wanted/ and could fill your pores with primordial venom/ & hang a sign around your neck that says/ don’t touch me I will kill you.“ 

“Over and over/ every week for ten years, even after her ‘mother doesn’t visit anymore,’” Warren’s speaker brings her sister and teaches “her dinosaur names. /& she repeats them to you in alphabetical order.”  They cross the yellow tape and play in skeleton pieces near the courthouse under magnolias. These girls grow up with dinosaurs as their companions and imagine new bodies— “somehow you know you will shed your burned skin/ you’ll trade it for seasoned leather or oceanic crust.” Their unique girlhood is filled with the ironic beauty of once-extinct creatures, now re-extinct in their polymer forms, yet who remain real to these isolated girls. 

In “Divination,” the speaker returns home to find her origins in decay.  Warren speaks to this moment in her poem, “&”, she describes the experience of extinction and loss in the present-day South:  

“a roadkill armadillo lives in pieces 

jaws melting into the rich soil… 

 

ghosts fracture from the ground 

to dream of buckshot and bird dogs… 

 

you feed your cultish sorrow 

to your animals swollen and musty with age” 

In the final chapter, “Apocalypses,” Warren speculates on an Armageddon through her speaker’s experience. A prequel is never explored, yet a plague of flood, fire, and disease has rendered this coastal plain into a swamp and ruin— a humid, bloated graveyard of feral dogs, swollen bodies, and starvation.   

In this series of prose poems filled with music, but never promising the salvation found in apocalyptic films, her poem, “all the lights go out at once,’’ states: “this is dystopia. this is eutopia. this is the same. a woman on the side of the highway scrapes a rabbit to gorgeous ribbons. her rotmouth is bloody with fur and insides.”  

Warren reminds us of something we’ve been feeling lately in our world, “the truth is you can’t rely on preparations because the newest method of destruction is always unexpected… no one stops to listen when you call out.” 

Warren might have seen every apocalyptic film ever made, and destroys their old wives’ speculations about survival:   

“I know what you’re thinking, but there is no happy ending. we will not gather as one. we will not come together arm-in-arm. we will not photograph ourselves, our hair braided with oil & water, for future evolutionary bipeds to caress. we will claw slick earth. we will bury ourselves like moles & live beneath the ground afraid & alone. we will lose our sight, our trimmed fingernails. we will grow elongated muzzles, furred bellies. Armageddon is already here.” 

In Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales, Warren’s characters wander the wastelands. Her speaker is now a young woman, given the task of survival, for herself and with a mother who has given up, and a sister who is becoming feral, as “she’s quickly forgetting this world isn’t normal”. 

She asks herself:  

“will you survive the long trek to the end of the earth if you bite your nails into talons, if you’re willing to eat your own sister, if you learn to fashion shoes from Maple leaves, grow your eyelashes hard as pine needles to keep out the dust, if you rip out your womb with your hands and feed it to wild dogs, will you survive evolution?” 

In the poem, “you write down warnings for the apocalypse,” the speaker says: 

“. . . there will be no singing. all the seasons will end at once… the rich will grow tall as pines, their weapons larger and louder. you’ll lose your sister and won’t forget. there is no singing. new teeth will cut through your gums sharp and white. you’ll know you’re still here still here still here.” 

And in the final poem, “upon the realization that the world has unfolded” Our speaker, (yourself) has evolved, she “howl(s) at the wild dogs & they (will) sit as wolves at your feet… you’ll find your own path in the sanguinous forest wearing the gloom dark as a cloak.”  

To conclude, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales is a beautifully unique and unsettling volume—dystopian fiction in verse. Hannah V. Warren leads us with exquisite and troubling details through a possible future. From its fascination with extinct creatures to the rebirth of our own animal natures, Slaughterhouse…is an exploration of human life on the brink of transformation. This book leaves us with deep thoughts on what humanity may become. 

Laura Secord is a poet, storyteller, and teaching artist. Her novel-in-poems, An Art, A Craft, A Mystery was awarded the 2024 Authors Award for Poetry by the Alabama Library Association and was chosen as the best Indie Historical Fiction of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews.  A Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in Poetry, NELLE, the Anthology, What Things Cost, Hobo Camp Review, Shift, Simple Machines, Cahoodleloodling, Finishing Line Press, Burning House Press, and more. She’s worked as a printer, union organizer, health care activist, teacher, sex-educator and nurse practitioner in community health and HIV care. She also served as Director of Community Engagement for The Magic City Poetry Festival.