Please join us to celebrate the launch of Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine. The reading will be hosted by Kate Wakeling. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost . You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here  and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

Punctuated by rhyme and shaped by traditional forms, the poems in Small Pointed Things turn encounters with the natural world and scenes from family life into acts of self-discovery. Poignant and funny in equal measure, many of these poems address human concerns by comically reimagining them through the analogous ‘lives’ of plants and animals – from snowdrops to love-lies-bleeding, manatees to warthogs, scorpions and moths to bats and swallows. Animals and insects provide opportunities for reflection: the difference between bats and swallows unpacks the complexity of spousal relations, two down-and-out warthogs arouse sudden, if unwarranted shame, and a pair of singing blackbirds tenderly expose the secret to marital compatibility and compromise. There are also poems about poetry and ideas, lasting love and grief. Formally deft and classically inspired, with hints of Wordsworth, Frost and Marianne Moore, the poems in Small Pointed Things seek to uncover various forms of knowledge while taking aim, ultimately, at knowingness itself.

About the speakers:

Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor of English at Oxford and the A.C. Cooper Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Her book The Poet’s Mistake appeared from Princeton University Press in 2020; a collection of poems, The Country Gambler, was published by Shearsman in 2016.

Kate Wakeling is a poet and musicologist. Her pamphlet, The Rainbow Faults, is published by The Rialto and recent work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, Magma, 14 Magazine and been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Her poetry collections for children have won the CLiPPA Prize and been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. She is writer-in-residence with Aurora Orchestra.