Flight of the Jaguar
Oct’18 – Sep’19
Computational Poetry, Book
Kickstarter Book
San Francisco
Book
Writing Flight of the Jaguar, it became clear form is to function, what context is to content, what medium is to the message and what stretching is to dancing. It is the way you prep the vessel that will channel the music. It is what sketching is to drawing, the skeleton that will hold the flesh and muscles. It is the elbow’s room the sculptor budgets for when diving into a sculpture. The storyboard for a movie. The soul that will hold the poem. Come poem, come.
The first version of the book was printed in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The paper was beige, smooth. The cover felt like a Japanese cup of tea, or an old tennis shoe from a vintage shop, broken into far too many times. It was imperfect. It was perfect. It was recycled. And the cover had no author name on it. It must have felt like a lot to place my name on it, like marking a child, declaring where its roots lie. Why burden the child with a last name, with a history it hadn’t yet claimed? A name would have fractured the first page. And so the book was the reader’s book. The poems weren’t mine — never were. The author is a listener, a bone that whistles as wind flows through, spirits strutting where marrow once lay. Creation, a shared act.
1st edition
2nd edition
Virtual Reality
Using Quill, I created a looping Virtual Reality illustration of a flying jaguar. Flight of the Jaguar is a collection of poems about ethical sluthood, the immigrant identity, queerness and plants that make you see colors. It seemed appropriate to invite the audience to share in the beast’s take off.