At the Point of Seeing *Winner Ockham 2024 Best First Book Award (the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry)*

At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Otepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching's poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked - the places between 'dirt and thumb' or 'together and alone' - and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulse to name, control and colonise meet nature's life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them. ... the garden is making something of you, situated on the border of dirt and thumb, the corner with its stepover wall where two streets grow neighbourly and flora and animal meet. - from 'Growing Advice'