BOOKS
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.
Poetry | GUERNICA EDITIONS | 2022
Archaic Torso of Gumby is a series of interlinked stories and essays by Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson that explore the gooey, prickly, sticky materials of late-capitalist pop culture, from video games to claymation to children’s picture-books commissioned by oil and gas companies. Here lyric essay, personal memoir, fable, pseudohistory, and science fiction all coexist alongside more conventional short story forms. By turns cerebral, goofy, and heartfelt, Archaic Torso of Gumby is a delirious rabbit hole for the adventurous reader.
Short Stories | GORDON HILL PRESS | 2020
For a Long Time is a story told in quotations, each of which contains the title phrase, beginning with Proust and ending with Jo Nesbø. At once fractured and cohesive, the narrative takes on the quality of a feverish incantation. The result is a surreal meditation on time, obsession, and repetition that spans centuries and prose styles.
Prose Poetry | FROG HOLLOW PRESS | 2019
SHORT STORIES
A surreal monologue from a curious kid named Livn: “I love going to the countryside and taking walks on the frozen river at night. The sound of the ice cracking under my feet is almost as pleasant as the cracking of my voice. There are usually a few pairs of people there, near the river, two or three couples on bicycles and often one tall man walking alone, the kind who walks away from a group to do his business in the woods. I always wonder why he walks so far from the others.”
Short Story | EXACTING CLAM | 2021
Paroxysms combines found text, concrete poetry, and glitch art. The work comprises thirty-six manipulated screenshots gathered from nineteenth-century medical texts about madness. These texts were found in online public-domain archives and include an 1806 treatise on insanity by the putative founder of modern psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, as well as an 1812 treatise on “diseases of the mind” by an American physician named Benjamin Rush. Exploiting a flaw in photo-editing software that is meant to remove unwanted blemishes from pictures (but dramatically mishandles text), these images are subjected to glitch and erasure, ultimately materializing as visual poems.
Visual Poetry | PAPER VIEW BOOKS | 2022
REVIEWS
“In many regards, Kinderkrankenhaus has the makings of a contemporary classic. The duo of Cinders and Gnome is as memorable and sharply drawn as the most famous literary duos, and the dialogue smolders. At one point in the play, Dr. Schmetterling, questioning Gnome’s mental capacity, suggests that to be “normal” is to speak the “right words in the right order at the right time.” In this remarkably inventive work, Bender dares to invert this formula, and the results are as brilliant as they are heartbreaking.”
Play Review | FULL STOP | 2021
Chapbook Review | THE BRITISH COLUMBIA REVIEW | 2021
“Morrison deftly balances moments of Rubik’s Cube cohesion with the deep satisfaction of disorientation, especially in the book’s “House” pantoums, where the form itself actively resists the possibility of a gestalt. The pantoum’s repeated lines have the effect of a mix-and-match flipbook, creating sublime derailments, non-sequiturs, and clang associations.”