Gut: Poems

by J. Bailey Hutchinson

Overview

Winner, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682262023
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Series:	Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

J. Bailey Hutchinson is from Memphis, Tennessee. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she served as assistant director of the Open Mouth Literary Center. She is an associate editor at Milkweed Editions, and her work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Ninth Letter, among other publications. She lives in Minneapolis.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface ix

Acknowledgments xix

Things Dying & Where 3

J. Bailey Hutchinson Prays to the River 4

Heat Advisory 7

Learning to Swim in the Mississippi 10

Big Dark 14

Ouroboros as Eight-Year-Old 18

Self-Portrait as Tomoe Mami, Beheaded by a Witch 20

Eat 21

The Minnesota State Fair's Miracle of Birth Center, Sponsored by Subaru 25

J. Bailey Hutchinson Takes Plan B in Marseille 27

I Have Never Had to Love Someone Who Beat Me 29

Obituary 30

Barbara 31

The Holes 32

Everyone Was Diagnosed with ADHD in the Nineties 33

Real Good Meat Eater 34

The Butcher's Granddaughter 35

My Dad Has Sleep Apnea and Has a Gun in His Nightstand 36

Things Dying & Where 38

Poem Written as Barter for $366.12 in Outstanding Bills 40

Dog Not Deer 42

Self-Portrait as Haruno Sakura, Kunoichi of Konohagakure 44

Carne e Spirito 45

Became My Body, Too 48

Poem Written as Barter for $75.00 in Outstanding Bills 61

Lineage 63

Things Dying & Where 65

Tennessee Wildman 66

Fox Song 71

Self-Portrait as Lin, Who Knows the Bathhouse 73

Discourse 74

Butterflies Are More Metal than Moths 76

J. Bailey Hutchinson Moves 658.8 Miles North and Tries to Make It Count 78

Notes 79

Editorial Reviews

I couldn’t be more energized and excited knowing that J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the first winning manuscript in my tenure as the Miller Williams series editor. In addition to snagging first place, Gut also grabs the honor for the most appropriate manuscript title ever—because the gut is exactly where this book hits, relentlessly, poem after poem, page after page. Here is family attending to its family business, its love, its suspicions, and its fears under an insisting sun or a cold and tenacious moon. Here is the thunderous Mississippi River coursing through it all, scrubbing some things blameless, washing away others. Here is bold southern sensibility, rapturous and addictive, crafting poems that are impossible to turn away from. Bailey touts a smoldering command of her slice of the world, and her astute ability to recreate all the delightful nuances of that world is fully at work in this winning book.”
—Patricia Smith, Series Editor

“In this dazzling and utterly original debut, J. Bailey Hutchinson writes: ‘It’s maybe that I won’t believe // words lack feet. And fur.’ Sheer bodily presence and desire drive many of the poems in this collection, written in an exuberantly idiosyncratic idiom, with which Hutchinson rassles joyfully and scrappily. Carnality and spirituality jostle each other good-naturedly in these pages, which are delicious and inspiring to read and to savor.”
—Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2022

Winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Hutchinson's first collection makes good on its title. "Do you know/ what I mean/ when I say/ I have types/ of hunger?" asks a speaker. The appetite of these poems evince a belief in the burrowing of language, how with the right tweaks, language reveals webs of connection among family, place, and sensation. From the sensuous "mud-scent shoaling my nose" of the Mississippi River to a "borborygmi/ beneath the hum, braided into her, braided into me," the poems speculate on memory as bodily past, an exchange of both people and places. An especially thought-provoking theme is the exploration of how people contain and withstand, with firm tenderness, exuberant impulses: a mother and her jumping child; a hand inserted into the mouth of a seizing baby. Hutchinson treats language similarly, exuberantly pushing it into other shapes, a person who "panthered the porch," someone "crude-ing growed up words." VERDICT Threaded with myth and ghosts, marvelously present to the senses, with wordsmithing so inventive as to thrill, this exciting work is recommended wherever poetry is read. —Amy Dickinson

Library Journal