Gut: Poems

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.”