PRESS
Garwood, I. — Best Video Essays of 2022, Sight and Sound Poll, British Film Institute, January 2023
“A wonderful example of how a short and simple concept can convey clear and impactful argumentation. In just 30 seconds, the sound choices made in this study have completely changed the way in which I look at subtitles and consider what they convey to those who are unable to listen simultaneously.”
Rader, M. — The Bell of the Artificial (Review of oems), BC Review, April 2022
“What I like most about Tomkinson’s book is that it renews the case for his human body, for the author as embodied, for language as embodied, for text as an extension of the body that feeds back into the body, for hearing the bell of the artificial within the natural as much as the other way around. That’s the sound of the universe and all its resistances. That, for me, is poetry.”
Holsgr, H. — The 100 Best Ambient Albums of 2022, Post Ambient Lux, December 2022
“#47: Mathoms — The Woe Trumpets”
DAAM. — DAAM Best of 2022, Distant Animals, December 2022
“There is an awful lot of movement for something that seems ostensibly quite static, and yet little redundancy — instead, The Woe Trumpets walks back and forth between ambient niceties and horror-movie drawls.”
Perfect Circuit. — Bandcamp Picks November 2022, Perfect Circuit, November 2022
“Musically, The Woe Trumpets is a collection of short pieces based on synthesized drones, found sounds, and various flavors of audio processing to match the ominous and anxious tone of the accompanying footage. With music composed in styles ranging from drone to musique concrète, many tracks emulate techniques used to score disaster films.”
CBC. — 48 Canadian Poetry Collections to Watch for in Fall 2022, CBC, September 2022
“Stemming from Matthew Tomkinson's lived experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, these poems circle the question of what remains after language has been altered in the compulsive tendencies of expression through writing.”
Verdeure, D. — The Woe Trumpets, Filmscalpel, September 2022
“It’s in these moments that The Woe Trumpets pays homage to what constitutes the lasting appeal of these disaster movies: not the calamities and catastrophes, but the perpetually recognizable angst for the unknown.”
Carrera, D. — Five Writers on How Writing with Creative Constraints Unlocked Their Projects, Literary Hub, September 2022
“I am often drawn to constraint-based approaches for this very reason: namely, because they give something back. They provide a certain level of texture against which a metaphorical match can more easily be struck. Moreover, they tend to save me from the unnameable pain of waiting to have an idea.”
Pirie, P. — oems: Poems by Matthew Tomkinson, The Miramichi Reader, September 2022
“Sonic as a monsoon’s concussive rain in a saucer.”
Huebert, D. — A Particular Wonky Elegance, Canadian Literature, April 2022
“Archaic Torso of Gumby is a strange, experimental, generically hybrid collection that is by turns powerfully imaginative, wickedly surprising, and totally hilarious […] Both thematically and formally, this book is fascinated by shape-shifting and plasticity, asking readers to rethink narrative norms and to tunnel the thin walls between story and external reality. Recurring themes include energy, animal life, materiality, psychedelic experience, and digital technology.”
Szuban, P. — Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson’s Archaic Torso of Gumby, The Temz Review, January 2022
“ATOG mobilizes a kaleidoscope of influences, histories, and literary styles, not to mention a bifurcated, symbiotic authorship, to fashion from form and content and method a text that repeatedly replicates the thought experiment of the duck-rabbit illustration.”
Karpinski, M. — Archaic Torso of Gumby, PRISM international, September 2021
“Archaic Torso of Gumby offers a deep and critical engagement with literary history, experimental art, and pop culture that is grounded in the collaborative ethos that shapes the book itself, and that is always reaching outward—implicating other texts, writers, readers, bodies […] If I were to venture a single-word summary of Gumby, I might, in the end, land on joyful.”
McLennan, R. — 20 Questions with Matthew Tomkinson, Rob McLennan’s Blog, July 2020
“My first publication was a chapbook called For a Long Time. The book is what I call a “story told in quotations,” which gathers together a collection of sentences containing the title phrase, beginning with Proust and ending with Jo Nesbø. Because I spent so many months looking for sentences beginning with those words, “for a long time,” I’m now unable to read or hear that expression without doing a double take. Which is to say: the biggest impact it’s had on my life is probably the way it continues to invade my consciousness.”