If all the pins in the world were gathered together
you would be very much pleased.
But all the pins in the world
cannot be gathered
together.
At the centre of this book-length poem is a sister’s disappearance, and a peculiar inheritance: an obsession with pins. Pins held between the teeth to tell a fortune, a downpour of a thousand pins, precious pins borrowed for an art installation. In this intelligent, intimate and often comic depiction of two sisters and their family, Natalie Morrison gathers together many tiny pinpricks of loss. Part poem, part letter, part inventory – but not limited to any one of these categories – this is a mesmerising debut. ‘I found Pins extraordinarily witty, perceptive, and moving. The family narrative unspools around two sisters whose pointed obsessions bring us something that echoes Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and Anne Kennedy’s 100 Traditional Smiles.’ —James Brown ‘The strangeness at the core of Morrison’s verse is . . . her strength. Pins is an intelligent and deeply unusual dark comedy, a pin pricking the bottom of a tender but ticklish foot.’ —Ollie Kavanagh Penno, Regional News