Matthew Tomkinson

Oems - Essential Poets Series Matthew Tomkinson

oems is a book of thirty-six poems about monomania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the insatiable pursuit of frission or "aesthetic chills." The result is a pornographically-polished lipogram owing as much to the constrained writing tradition of Oulipo as it does to an oddly satisfying timelapse of someone mowing a field with a scythe. The book eschews all words containing ascenders and descenders (the letters b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y) in order to create a highly uniform, flat aesthetic. The poems are fixated on this typographic flatness and the book could be thought of as an extended meditation on the shape of smooth, non-jagged words.