Taper #9 : Nine Lives
Fall 2022

Awash, pacing, converging, expanding, revealing, swirling, nested, inscribed, emplotted, quizzical, descending, extensive, amazing, torrential, diurnal, spiralling, staticky. The poems in this issue span, as often, a wide range, providing an impossible overflow of reading matter and an ever-shifting analphabetic maze. One packs phrases into a file system’s hierarchy. Guess the answer to fill in blanks in one case and use the observer effect to settle on a cat’s particular property in another. Now, is that cat a particle or a wave? See how the browser can capture it falling through space.

Felis catus isn’t the only creature featured: A jaguar tracks words through a sparse forest. A fox’s tail grows almost imperceptibly. One poem speaks of a human-scale irregularity alongside the regular passage of the day; another shows bread spontaneously forming from constituents. Phrases roil as if forming a ring of Hell, become the ink for your drawing instrument, and slowly appear in a contemplative path that you can uncover. Spinning lines about a new sort of time compel a reading in a new sort of time. After an enigmatic static start, click to find generative texts drawn from Murakami Haruki. Finally, but not least, plunge into a pair of liquid visual poems, one presenting a flow of circulating numerals (swirling faster if you use Chrome) while another lets out psychedelic rain.