Parents, babies and everyone else - you're invited to the double launch of Annie Muir's Middle Child and Saskia McCracken's Let Me Carry That For You - both poetry collections shaped by parenthood. Let Me Carry That For You by Saskia McCracken is a collection of poems that meditate on the complex relationship between maternity and family history. Both poignant and refreshing, McCracken’s verses swing from the darkness of generational guilt to the intoxicating joy of new life, from ecological mourning to the strange weight of unsolicited remarks from strangers. It is a thoroughly original and moving account of pregnancy, intergenerational memory and what it means to carry.

‘A fascinating consideration of how the family tree might reach its branches right into the womb… these are poems that investigate while they love, and love while they generously invite us to learn.’ – JL Williams

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. Across the book, domestic objects become portals, photographs become moral tests, and memory behaves like a myth being revised in real time.

'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

CW: Nazism, birth trauma

Saskia is a poet and author bsaed in Glasgow. She teaches Life Writing at the University of Glasgow. @saskiamccracken