At the Point of Seeing

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’

Megan Kitching was born in Tamaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Otepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The FrogmorePapers (UK), takahe, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “ The horses,” published in takahe 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.