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  Tumbling for Amateurs

  Matthew Gwathmey

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  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIDDLEHEAD POETRY BOOK PRIZEA reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.  
  Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.  
  Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”  
  “We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other." Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey's poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire." – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book 
  "Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists—evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations—Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to 'what must remain / nameless.' There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is."
    – John Barton, author of Lost Family 
  "Gwathmey's poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present." – Paul Legault, author of The Tower

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  Paper

  Chris Bush

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  'People don't need scissors. They don't need beautiful, handcrafted, ninety pound scissors, however impressive they might be. But they do need somewhere to live.'
  Faye and Mel have been together forever. Two kids, a mortgage and a diabetic hamster. A regular, unexceptional existence. They work hard, they get by, they do their best. So if it's true - if Faye's father really has left the factory to her - they'd deserve it, wouldn't they? The site could be worth a fortune - not for making scissors, but ripe for redevelopment. It could change everything. But first they need the paperwork.
  Paper is a play about family, heritage and legacy, and is part of Chris Bush's triptych of plays about a Sheffield manufacturing family, Rock / Paper / Scissors. The three plays were first performed simultaneously with the same cast moving between three theatres in Sheffield – the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Studio – as part of Sheffield Theatres' fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2022.

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  Please make me pretty I don't...

  Tawanda Mulalu

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  The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry 
   
   
   
  Please make me pretty, I don't want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. 
   
   
   
  The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

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  Cutting Room

  Sarah Pinder

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  Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and 'natural' spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. Theseare little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.

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  aka bpNichol - A Preliminary...

  Frank Davey

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  Reflecting on the career of a prominent poet, this biography focuses on Canadian wordsmith Barrie Nichol — more commonly known by his pen name, bpNichol — who was a practicing lay psychoanalyst and vice president of one the largest and long-lasting North American communes for more than a decade. Recognizing his international influence as both a visual and sound poet, Nichol's literary achievements are reviewed, including The Martyrology, a renowned, seven-volume poem, four novels, two musical comedies, six children's books, hundreds of hand-drawn visual poems, and even 10 episodes of Jim Henson's hit television series Fraggle Rock. Penned by one of Nichol's numerous literary collaborators, this account reveals the close connections among the writer's various activities, particularly how the autobiographical inquiries and Freudian dream theory linked with the young poet's biographical self-awareness. The book demonstrates how the Subject's main psychoanalytic client was his own writing, following Nichol as he explored its slips, accidental puns, and unintended meanings and implications for the communal future of the human species, both in high literature and comical prime time television.

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  Sweet Words of Life (Christian...

  Fimalia McNoll

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  I traveled the dirt road with no water in sight. 
  My lips parched and dry from the burning sun. 
  My feet cracked and rough, cut with sharp stones. 
  I had traveled this road many times. 
  I knew the trail, yet somehow this time 
  it seemed unfamiliar; 
  All around was desolation, bareness, and emptiness. 
  I was tired of the heat; I cried out to God 
  "Father please come rescue me." 
  He said, "I am right here." 
  He was just waiting for me to ask for help. 
  He gave me water for my thirst, 
  Food for my hungry soul, and he walked on with me. 
  I trust him more now, 
  I know I will never pass this way again.

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