Middle 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. The collection moves with restless tonal agility, from the blistering vignette of ‘cool facts about electricity’ to the tender absurdity of ‘Justin’, from the relish of a handbag raised against a neo-Nazi march to the lyricism of ‘ode to my menstrual cup’. Across the book, domestic objects become portals, photographs become moral tests, and memory behaves like a myth being revised in real time.
 
PRAISE for Middle Child:
Here is a voice that shifts and slips from self to ‘other’ to elsewhere, and then back again. The reader is both held and destabilized within a lyric that nips at the folds of time and place to reveal not only the delicate layers of a single heartfelt moment, but also what preceded it and what might happen next. From encounters over a jukebox, to an unsettling gift of a doll, Middle Child believes in seeing, and is full of startling insights into all the contradictions and paradoxes of a life, that ultimately give it meaning.
— Tessa Berring
 
ABOUT Annie Muir:
Annie Muir is a poet and workshop facilitator based in Glasgow. She has a podcast, Time for One Poem, aimed at complete beginners to poetry. @time41poem