We are delighted to announce that Robin Tomens has won the second Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for an innovative manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be! Resurrecting seemingly obsolete technology, Tomens uses a typewriter to create evocative visual poems that both invite and resist being read. Invigorating and a little disorienting, one comes away from these poems with the mind aswim in possibilities. You Would Say That will be published this summer. Pre-order your copy here; it’s not a book to be missed.
”Using typewriters, print, acrylic, carbon paper, and pen, Robin Tomens in You Would Say That playfully captures that ‘chattering’ in his head ‘that won’t stop’ as he unmoors letter from word, word from sense, each poem typed and retyped, layering the page. Sometimes a piece crystallizes out of that atomic layering into a moment of familiar clarity. A word or phrase. A complete sentence. And then, as often as not, a piece simply, beautifully—I think happily—stalls in a ruckus built for the eye. Page by page, Tomens not only maps the angularity and dynamics embedded in visual poems but simultaneously reveals the angularity, the false starts, the do-overs, the frustrations, in the process of that utterance. Tomens’ You Would Say That is a tactile, pleasurable read—ink on the hand, ink in the eye—that cuts to the heart of the alchemy between letter and word, and ultimately, thinking.” —Dennis Hinrichsen, author of schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize
"Robin Tomens’ You Would Say That explores the dead language of manual typewriters, a poetry which chatters from craft to architecture. The familiar logic of the typewriter, the anchor of our desk, slips away and letters slide off the grid into a choreographed questioning, pirouettes of punctuation. Hold tight, read differently, and open your mind to an atomistic collision, bonds forming and breaking in a bountiful microscopic ballet."
—Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate
About the Author
Robin Tomens has been making art since producing zines in the Punk era. His multimedia collages and visual poetry have been featured in the exhibition Visual Poetry on the Page: With, Within, and Without the Word and with The Tunnel collective in London. Timglaset (Sweden) and Redfoxpress (Ireland) have published his booklets; his work has also appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and Explorations In Media Technology. His art has been used for album covers, and he makes his own artist’s books, most recently a collection of typewriter art called Yes I No. He has also written a book on Jazz, Points of Departure: Essays on Modern Jazz (Stride, 2001) and contributed to Cut Up! (Oneiris Books, 2014). He lives in London.
A fond thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript for us to consider. It has been an honor to be entrusted with so much fine work. Sincere congratulations to the finalists, whose work we found truly remarkable:
Aimee Wright Clow’s Dear, A Ballerina
James D’Agostino’s The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
Carol Ann Davis’s From Their Salts
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton’s Tilt
Molly Fuller’s Honey Suckle Wolf
Rae Gouirand’s The Velvet Book
Don Hogle’s Meet Me at Waterloo Station
Donald Platt’s Tender Voyeur
Dan Rosenberg’s Esau