POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2009 T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER OF THE IRISH TIMES POETRY NOW AWARD 2010 Sinéad Morrissey's fourth collection explores fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood in poems that are by turns tender, exuberant and unsettling. Pitched against the envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts - from Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll's Alice - that amplify her theme. Infancy is for Morrissey the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed.