Published on the Web (online journal)

Hot Air reimagines a passage from Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry, in which the words spoken by a village's residents rise into the sky like smoke from a fire, eventually requiring cleaners to rise up in balloons and sweep away the stubborn utterances with brooms.

In this case, however, the village has become the web. The road is composed of today's most popular Google search terms. Each building is constructed of the most recent tags from some of the most popular web sites, including The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, Engadget and YouTube. Actual reader comments from each site rise from the buildings. A cleaner in a balloon attempts to clear the sky, but the comments want to be heard -- they don't always go quietly.

Hot Air checks the sites for new tags and comments every five minutes, providing viewers with a sense of each site’s content as well as its current social temperature -- not through the sterile text of a web browser or news reader, but within the frame of a storybook narrative. Like the villagers' words in Winterson's story, the comments on a blog post often take on a life of their own, overshadowing the original content. And any attempt to control or quiet those comments is ultimately ineffective.

(Source: Author's description at Hyperrhiz)

Like the advice given by the speaker’s father, this kinetic and aural poem is all about “presentation and perfect arrangement.” It is about knowing where to cut visual and aural language, images and sound clips, arranging them on the poem’s space to make an impression. Yet while the speaker seems to be learning what her father has to say, one can sense the tension in her as she conforms to a vision of how one presents oneself and in what contexts. The masculinity of the images juxtaposed with the words “a firm handshake, after church” contrast with the more feminine figure we see leaning by the stove or hunched in silhouette. Listen to this poem and you’ll realize that it hovers in that space between tradition and innovation, expressive orality and through new media, conformity and rebellion, and different types of distance and proximity. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

A collection of very short stories, published as images in a photo album on Facebook. This is a selection of the original Hebrew, translated by Jessica Cohen for, and published by, the journal Electric Literature.

This lyric hypertext poem is based on a speaker’s thoughts and observations centered upon the pines at Walden Pond, a space celebrated in American literature thanks to Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, his experiment in self-reliance and Transcendental song.

Larsen’s hypertext is mapped upon an image of a pine branch, in which several nodes are connected by spindly linear trails. Each trail of links can be interpreted as a line of thought, starting with four nodes that focus on the pines, the speaker’s perception of them, Thoreau, and the speaker herself. Following the link trails lead to nodes that hold together well, though there are both physical and conceptual branchings. Clicking on links as they appear within each text also creates thematic associations. Both ways navigating this poem lead to a powerfully associative coherence in a piece that engages the beauty of the place while questioning some of Thoreau’s politics.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)