Robin Tomens is the winner of Green Linden Press's second annual Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for an innovative manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be. Resurrecting seemingly obsolete technology, Tomens uses a typewriter to create evocative visual poems that both invite and resist being read. One comes away from You Would Say That with the mind aswim in possibilities.

Praise for You Would Say That

Robin Tomens’ You Would Say That explores the dead language of manual typewriters, a poetry which chatters from craft to architecture. The familiar logic of the typewriter, the anchor of our desk, slips away, and letters slide off the grid into a choreographed questioning, pirouettes of punctuation. Hold tight, read differently, and open your mind to an atomistic collision, bonds forming and breaking in a bountiful microscopic ballet.
—Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate

Using typewriters, print, acrylic, carbon paper, and pen, Robin Tomens in You Would Say That playfully captures that “chattering” in his head “that won’t stop” as he unmoors letter from word, word from sense, each poem typed and retyped, layering the page. Sometimes a piece crystallizes out of that atomic layering into a moment of familiar clarity. A word or phrase. A complete sentence. And then, as often as not, a piece simply, beautifully—I think happily—stalls in a ruckus built for the eye. Page by page, Tomens not only maps the angularity and dynamics embedded in visual poems but simultaneously reveals the angularity, the false starts, the do-overs, the frustrations, in the process of that utterance. Tomens’ You Would Say That is a tactile, pleasurable read—ink on the hand, ink in the eye—that cuts to the heart of the alchemy between letter and word, and ultimately, thinking.
—Dennis Hinrichsen, author of schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize

Here Tomens, in his inveterate way, invents a lively geometry to revitalize the typewriter, giving it a new role as a visual artist, out of which language, nonetheless, frequently emerges, also renewed. Several phrases that appear in the first part of the book are actually song titles—and of tunes from the age of the typewriter—so the viewer finds herself humming her way from page to page, thinking that Tomens plays the typewriter like a musical instrument—or even directs it as an orchestra. And this is nothing new for him; his deep investment, literally for decades, in the interactions and collisions among emergent and persistent technologies has resulted in so many revelatory works. This book is a particular gem among that rich array.
—Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time