Kink and Particle

The 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.

Tiffany 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 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.

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