There were many things that Hollie McNish didn’t know before she was pregnant. How her family and friends would react; that Mr Whippy would be off the menu; how aggressive formula marketing is and the double standard of anti-breastfeeding tirades in a country full of ‘billboards covered in tits’.

How should she stand while holding a baby? How will she do a poetry gig with her baby as a member of the audience? How do you answer a question like ‘is the world a jigsaw’?

Poems of sex, pregnancy, commercialisation, feeding, gender and parenthood are introduced and expanded alongside Hollie’s diary entries. ‘Megatron’ starts off anecdotally by recounting her trip her to see the new Transformers film and ends by triumphing the transformation undergone by women’s bodies in pregnancy. It’s this ability of adding up everyday experience to something bigger that gives McNish’s poetry its unique power, the velvet glove of her humour masking the iron fist of a call for change.

About Hollie

Hollie McNish is a published UK poet based between London, Cambridge and Glasgow. She has two poetry collections - Cherry Pie and Papers and three poetry albums, Touch, Push Kick and Versus, which made her the first poet to record at Abbey Road Studios, London. She was UK Slam poetry champion in 2009, representing the UK and finishing 3rd behind Canada and the USA in the World Poetry Slam Finals in Paris. Hollie has over 10k twitter followers and her most popular youtube videos ‘Mathematics’ and ‘Embarrassed’ have garnered over 3 million views and been tweeted by celebrities as diverse as Davina McCall and Pink.

Tickets: £7.50

Followed by a Book Signing

Produced in partnership with City Sound Project