oems is a collection of thirty-six lipogrammatic poems composed entirely of flat words such as “sunrise” or “unconsciousness,” which contain no ascending or descending letters. Proceeding from the author’s lived experience of OCD, the book leans into obsessive-compulsive tendencies, attempting to exorcise them through overuse. In the spirit of rumination, these poems repeatedly circle one nagging question: namely, the matter of what remains after language has been sifted and sorted, sandpapered and planed. In chasing the frisson of a polished stanza, oems performs a personal reckoning with the pleasures of fixation, the virtues of sublimation, and the costs of erasure.

Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, sound designer, and doctoral student in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia. His essays have been published in The Town Crier and Performance Matters, and his chapbook, For a Long Time, is available through Frog Hollow Press. Matthew has worked as a composer and sound designer with Company 605, Kinesis Dance somatheatro, and a number of other local dance artists, and his music has been presented at multiple festivals including PuSh, Dancing on the Edge, and Vines. He lives in Vancouver on the unceded territory of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

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