Middle Child by Annie Muir Rupert M Loydell ‘In poems at once tender

‘In poems at once tender and elegiac

its development across the seventeenth century and its influence on later poets and includes A Very Short History of Metaphysical Poetry from Donne to Rochester

Learning is carried lightly

Qasmiyeh is able to both fragment and distil time

Middle Child by Annie Muir Rupert M Loydell ‘In poems at once tenderMiddle Child by Annie Muir is a book of sharp, funny, quietly brutal recognitions, where the everyday turns uncanny and the self keeps slipping between roles, versions, and borrowed scripts. Through poems that riff on Frankenstein, pop culture, pub lore, found images and borrowed forms, Muir writes the middle child's sensibility as a kind of heightened surveillance, noticing how bodies are appraised, threatened, desired, marketed, and made to perform.