So Many Moving Parts

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’.

Reviews of Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla et al: 'Thin-skinned, labile, multi-hued and engaging, these poems enact as much as describe. They are speech in action - The poem - becomes an event' - Oliver Reynolds, TLS. 'A smart, sardonic and vulnerable updating of Catullus - Atkinson's versions are in the finest tradition of creative adaptation: keeping the originals as ballast, but unafraid to sail off on their own tangents - Other poets translate Catullus; Atkinson creates Catulla, a modern, anxious, sympathetic and merciless persona, caught up in a life she sees through but can't quite get beyond' - Patrick McGuinness, Guardian. 'Occasional poems start conventionally enough in landscape of the weather and disclose their depths through tautness of style and singularly precise imagery. Others - riskily balance captivating surfaces and dark narrative lacunae' - Douglas Houston, Poetry Review. 'Catulla augments Atkinson's fabulous inventory of metaphor and feeds her poems the drama of living language where lines stop in the middle, don't obey rules. Her work is funny and brave and Catulla exerts a moreish power over it' - Jackie Wills, The Warwick Review.