Creative Writing Program's Hannah V Warren Debuts Poetry Collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives' Tales

Creative Writing Program Graduate Student Hannah V Warren's full-length debut poetry collection, Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales, with Sundress Publications is “a visceral collection that is not only read but also felt in the body.” It is available on Tuesday, January 30th whereever you buy books!

“These fertile poems trace the lineage of hunger from mother to daughter to sister. Beginning with an excavation of dinosaurs, Warren’s writing explores evolution—where we come from, what we offer, and what is left behind “when we plant our tree bodies.” This is a collection of bones and organs. The line between flesh and earth, human and animal, blurs in its gorgeous, gruesome descriptions. Warren weaves language in ways that birth new meaning—“tender gash,” “rotmouth,” “skindamp,” “lung-wide.” Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales will leave you breathless, haunted, and ravenous for more.“
- Sundress Publications

"Hannah V Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales is a biography of extinctions and a seance with the future. These poems lean deep into the estranged south with its haunted and gorgeous decompositions, folding in difficult intergenerational relationships and unburying what the earth has tucked inside itself. Here, the past is excavated. What pretended to be a museum of artificial wildernesses is also a place where something still moves between the bones. The fossilized mythologies that nested in the ribs of history come undone in the elemental intimacy of these poems." —Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

"Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales is a brilliant, beast-toothed page-turner of a collection. Here, Southern Gothic twists into apocalypse, fables are as real as fossils, and the horrors of survival bloom like mushrooms after rain. ‘Comfort has never sold you a cure,’ warns Warren. ‘Do not turn away.’ This haunting, gorgeous book won’t let you. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I’ll never forget it." —Catherine Pierce, author of Danger Days

"In her menacing debut, a feral oneiric panic attack, Hannah V Warren assays to ‘sing wicked & slant / until the world licks you clean again.’ But the world is too rancid with roadkill and rot, gristle and bone of our earthly abattoir, to perform such ablutions. Instead, the South and its family anarchies are a visceral mirror to the afterlife inside this one, as the speaker becomes an uncanny Daphne, her infirm body overrun by kudzu and witchcraft, venom and clay. Where the Mesozoic hasn’t ended yet, yet Armageddon is already here, no wonder ‘gunpowder makes the heart grow fonder.’" —Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun