The Point Is You Are Alive

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.