The poems of Middle Youth look directly into the fire. Sometimes they find joy and the possibility of sustaining oneself; sometimes they feel the sense of an ending. Morgan Bach writes with a dark, crackling energy and controlled rage about the world we find ourselves in. Here are the loves that fill and drain us, tarot readings under a roof weighted with snow, and a body that keeps on moving though it feels like a full stop. Here is the usefulness of hope, even a secret one. 'These poems are bitter as a herbal tonic and salty as the sea itself. They are bloody and brutal and aware of the strange rhythms of their own heartbeat.' -Hannah Mettner, author of Saga and Fully Clothed and So Forgetful 'Who wants to be hot / on a doomed planet? Morgan Bach bathes the ending generations in forest fire radiance, partying contagiously on the edge of the extinction event where we become brittle stars unable to tell the quaking earth from our shaky hearts. Middle Youth looks out from this faded blue dot and its leaky seed banks to other love-struck planets, and inward to birthdays nobody quite expected to celebrate as the years stretch and flee in every direction.' -Rebecca Hawkes, author of Meatlovers Morgan Bach was the recipient of the 2013 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry, and her first book, Some of Us Eat the Seeds, was published in 2015. Some of her recent work appears in Turbine, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems. In 2014, with Hannah Mettner and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she co-founded the online poetry journal Sweet Mammalian.