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Tiffany Atkinson's fourth collection asks how poetry may help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love.
About the author
Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Wales after moving to Cardiff to take a PhD in Critical Theory. After teaching at Aberystwyth University for some years, she is now Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She won the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. She is the editor of a theoretical textbook, The Body: A Reader (2003), and has strong research interests in the medical humanities, especially the history of anatomy and representations of the body. Her fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), includes a sequence exploring representations of pain, illness and recovery - work that won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. She is currently working on a series of critical essays about 'the poetics of embarrassment'.
Summary
How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection includes her sequence ‘Dolorimeter’, which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in meditations on the notion that pain resists language.
