Middle Child (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781917617598)

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.