Kristin Hatch is an American poet whose debut collection, the meatgirl whatever, was selected by K. Silem Mohammad for the National Poetry Series. Fence Books published the collection after its selection in the 2012 competition. Hatch’s poetry is known for its collision of lyric intensity, grotesque comedy, service-industry language, bodily imagery, satire, and fractured everyday speech.
Her work sits comfortably among contemporary poets who bring workplace experience, popular culture, gender, and unstable forms of speech into the poem. Shampoo published Hatch during the period in which many of the concerns later associated with her first book were already visible in her writing.
the meatgirl whatever
the meatgirl whatever won the National Poetry Series and was published by Fence Books. The collection builds a strange and volatile world from restaurant labor, appetite, bodies, violence, humor, disgust, fantasy, and the pressures of service work. Its speakers move through kitchens and dining rooms where ordinary employment becomes psychologically and linguistically extreme.
The book’s combination of abrasion and lyricism attracted critical attention for the way it turns workplace roles into a larger drama of power, desire, performance, and vulnerability. Its compressed syntax and surreal transformations place it within a broader tradition of experimental poetry that treats the textures of ordinary language as material for formal invention.
Through the Hour Glass
Hatch is also the author of Through the Hour Glass, a chapbook published by CutBank Books after it was named a runner-up in CutBank’s 2012 chapbook competition. The project draws on characters and plotlines from Days of Our Lives, using soap-opera memory, childhood fantasy, melodrama, and lowbrow culture as poetic materials.
That project shows another side of Hatch’s work: television, nostalgia, humor, and cultural cliché become structures through which poems can examine desire and self-invention.
National Poetry Series
The National Poetry Series has supported the publication of American poetry books since 1978. Hatch joined its roster when K. Silem Mohammad selected the meatgirl whatever in the 2012 Open Competition. The selection placed her book within a long-running national program that has published work by poets across several generations and aesthetics.
Kristin Hatch and Shampoo
Hatch appeared in Shampoo’s Issue 34 in December 2008. Her contribution belongs to the magazine’s wider record of writers who later developed substantial books through independent presses. Readers can continue through Shampoo’s guide to modern poetry or browse the poets archive.
The National Poetry Series maintains a record of the book and its selection.