These poems are unsettling in the best sort of way. Many of them critique medical practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, and I found the ones that evoked twilight births and their precursors (births in which a woman was chloroformed, for instance) especially haunting. Questions of memory and forgetting swirl throughout the book and, perhaps as a way to fill the spaces in which women have been unable to be present and conscious for births, Hoffman uses unlikely speakers (fetuses, a gurney strap, an embryological sketch, a liver) to serve as witnesses. These poems offer empathy for pregnant women, their bodies, and all of what grows in those bodies, especially that which is deemed monstrous or malformed. Interspersed throughout the book are poems based on court testimonies and the writings of Early Modern doctors, which serve as the official record to which and against which the other poems speak. 
 I'd highly recommend this collection, especially to folks who enjoyed The Resurrection Trade, as this book draws on similar histories and practices but approaches them from startlingly different perspectives.