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.