Kirjahaku

What do we mean when we talk about 'the body'? This Reader challenges the assumption that it can be invoked as a neutral, or indeed natural, point of reference in critical discussion or cultural practice. The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of 'the body' throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological 'given', but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.

With an introduction by Tiffany Atkinson, this collection from the most recent class of poets to graduate from the UEA s renowned UEA Creative Writing MA brings together a sparkling constellation of new voices."These are poems that look dangerous on the page. They travel a lot often without the safety of a compass and they frequently find their way into territory where a moment ofchange seems surprising and sudden and inevitable. That s to say, these poems like to keep company with truth and risk and transformation. Yet sometimes they also pause in quiet places, where you can almost hear them whispering about beauty."- Bill Manhire, UNESCO City of Literature Visiting Professor, 2015.

How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection includes the prize-winning 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 a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

"Catulla et al" summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus - his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy - by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment. The Catulla poems in her second book show a shift away from the loosely confessional or straightforwardly narrative poems of her first collection, "Kink and Particle", towards a more explicit playfulness with stories. Other poems try to keep one foot in a recognisable real worldA" while still bending it out of shape with strange plot twists, elements of folk tale or myth, and philosophical musings. Catulla et al was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).

So Many Moving Parts, Tiffany Atkinson's third collection, is an eccentric 21st-century meditation on the awkwardness of body and spirit and their unexpected, often unwanted intrusions into the business of everyday life. Lyrical and experimental by turns, these poems push familiar events - commuting, telephones, babysitting, foreign travel - to open out toward unanswerable questions and elemental connections with an unstable physical world. A cast of real people observed over a year reveal momentary dramas as in a series of sketches, and the poet turns an ironic, unflinching eye on her own generation's transition from youth to middle age. Bold, wishful, ambivalent, sometimes even grudgingly affectionate, the collection is a spiky celebration of the almost invisible revelations that insist when you only look closely enough. Winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).

Winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers AwardThe poems of Tiffany Atkinson's debut collection, Kink and Particle, offer us multiple perspectives, including those of a woman on the brink of 30. This crucial birthday is a milestone from which the speaker looks back to childhood experiences, to the more indulgent pleasures of the 20s and then onwards to a mysterious but much-anticipated future.The poet's style is often an apparently casual, almost 'throwaway' vernacular that nevertheless has been formulated with great care. The effect is of intimacy, as if in a letter from a friend, and offers an immediacy, a diary-like quality of authenticity. The author's eye for quirky detail, observed, recalled and imagined, is especially striking. Her eye and ear for Aberystwyth, the somewhat eccentric coastal university town where she lives, is also entertainingly apt. Her style lends itself particularly well to love poems, several of which are included in Kink and Particle."It's easy to see why Kink and Particle has been chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It's quirky and feisty and witty – sometimes all at the same time… this is a poet to watch."Planet"Tiffany Atkinson is yet another fine poet to appear from Seren, a publisher whose stock continues to rise. Like Carcanet and Bloodaxe, it has effortlessly transcended the category of small regional press, and continues to challenge the hegemony of some metropolitan houses." WN Herbert, Poetry London"Kink and Particle marks the arrival of a significant new poet."New Welsh ReviewTiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Germany, Cyprus and Britain. After studying English at Birmingham University she took a PhD in Critical Theory at Cardiff, and has lived in Wales ever since. She lectures in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she also co-hosts a weekly poems-and-pints event. Her poetry has appeared widely in magazines and she won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2001.

New poetry from the world-renowned UEA Creative Writing MA: Poetry 2016 student cohort.