Tumbling for Amateurs by Matthew Gwathmey

A 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.’
‘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 … Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing
the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to
“what must remain / nameless.”’ – John Barton, author of Lost Family
‘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 … Gwathmey transforms instruction
into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire.’
– Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book

Matthew Gwathmey was born in Richmond, Virginia, and currently lives in
Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory, with his partner Lily and
their five children. He studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and
recently completed his PhD at UNB. He has work published in the Malahat
Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, and the Iowa Review, as well as
other literary magazines. His first poetry collection, Our Latest in Folktales, was
published by Brick Books in the spring of 2019. 

SBN 978 1 55245 469 5
5.75 x 8.5, 96 pp. | pbk
$22.95 CDN | $17.95 US
POE023000 POETRY /
Subjects & Themes /
General
EPUB 978 1 77056 776 4