Taper #13

As luck has it, this issue is especially wide-ranging, for instance in the amount of text the poems present: Some exchange lyrical “I”s for eyes, presenting mainly a transforming arrangement of evil ones, or show a pair of them you can illuminate with a click. Readers are invited to peer closely and imagine themselves seeking urban wildlife. A figurative portrait coheres in one; another presents more abstract lunar imagery in cyclical and erratic time. At the other extreme are superabundances of text — one allowing readers to stamp saturations of the same phrase, another presenting a decatotritonol torrent. Read as much as you like of an endless sequence of personal stories, subtly varying, or some of the boundless 13-line sonnets that you can generate Swiftly. (Neither Tom Swiftly nor Jonathan Swiftly.) Other poems of this length enumerate concoctions to preserve youth and, conversely, the opposition to social pressure about appearance.

There’s a wheel of fortune (en español, and legible across languages) along with an alternative to binary floral divination. An emoji faceoff features Spanish and English; an interactive grid lets you shuffle a Yiddish word. Poems that begin as more traditional texts are vibrant in various ways, whether deteriorating over time, or inviting a decoding under a witchy gaze, or transforming in response to input (note: won’t currently work on Firefox) or popping up as alluring confections. One of them appears word by word, three-dimensionally; another, through grief, asks the reader to seize scraps. Here, you can also see superstitions embedded in technologies past and present, from the terminal window to the fax machine. There are simulations of computing at home and of elevator conveyance. Poems offer play and present ludic dimensions, whether it’s a snake game that unfolds a poem, a side-shooter serving as manifesto, a clicker against gravity, or a happy (or perhaps luckless) adventure.