Polly Atkin
Duration
Polly Atkin is a poet and essayist based in Grasmere, Cumbria. During her residency, Polly will be working on her second poetry collection Much With Body, taking time to edit and redraft as well as work on new poems. Much With Body revolves around key themes of location and dislocation, contemporary rural life, and living with chronic illness, exploring what it might mean, and cost, to reconcile oneself with daily pain; pain which is largely invisible to others. It will combine poems drawn from lived experience and autobiography, with found poems to capture both the universality and specificity of bodily experience. As well as poems that focus primarily on bodily healths, there are poems which turn to animals and the nonhuman to think through these questions differently, and a series of poems that explore bonds of friendship and creative collaboration between women.