Released April 30th, 2025 // 60 pages // 978-1-916938-88-5 // RRP: £12.99
Natalie Whittaker’s The Point Is You Are Alive is an intricate and unflinching meditation on loss, memory, and survival. Moving between intimate recollection and sharp social observation, Whittaker’s poetry inhabits the raw spaces between grief and persistence, presence and absence. With a keen eye for urban and natural landscapes, the collection navigates the quiet devastations of the everyday—a brick through a windscreen, a search history haunted by medical terminology, the indifferent flight of parakeets over South East London. Unsentimental yet deeply affecting, this is poetry that does not offer easy resolution, but instead insists, with quiet urgency, on the necessity of witness.
PRAISE for The Point Is You Are Alive:
In The Point Is You Are Alive Natalie Whittaker guides the reader through her corner of South East London, a place of grim urban detritus, accidental beauty and sometimes love. Her formal skills are evident in poems that carry us from street to bus to park, noting what others might miss, while honouring the gaps between vision and experience. The collection includes the sequence ‘Tree’, which charts the terrible loss and grief of a stillbirth; in this, as in all her work, Whittaker is clear-eyed, humane and fearless. Her poetry shows us how to survive and find solace in places of trauma.
—Tamar Yoseloff
The Point is You Are Alive is the best collection I have read in years. Yes, there is mastery of technique, a vivid and authentic sense of place, a refreshing honesty and lack of pretension – but, more than this, Whittaker’s work reminds us that, in the right hands, poetry can deliver the kind of searing emotional impact that leaves you on the floor. From the precision and economy of poems that capture the sights and sounds of South East London, to Whittaker’s brilliantly inventive approach to writing trauma, to a closing poem that would knock the breath from the most hard-hearted of readers, this is a collection to be treasured.
— Rosalind Easton
ABOUT Natalie Whittaker:
Natalie Whittaker is a poet and teacher from South East London. She is the author of two pamphlets: Shadow Dogs, and Tree, which has also been published in French. Natalie was a London Library Emerging Writer 2020 – 2021.
