Caroline Bird, Rachel McCrum

Caroline and Rachel will perform work from their new collections, with music from solo acoustic act Roseanne Reid and her distinctive brand of Americana magic.

In her fifth collection of poetry Caroline Bird surrenders her poetic weaponry and goes on a quest to write the ‘simple truth’. The surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us living. In These Days of Prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, ‘revving on a wish’

The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate is the eagerly anticipated debut collection from the award-winning Rachel McCrum. Recognised as one of Scotland’s highest profile poets and performers and co-founder of cult spoken word night Rally & Broad, her first collection asks questions of displacement and of the elasticity of space; of human defensiveness and of animal aggression; of inertia and movement: of threat and of resistance. What happens when we raise our voices? What happens when we are no longer heard?