Flight of the Jaguar
Apr’18Computational Poetry, Book, Virtual Reality
San Francisco
Kickstarter
Flight of the Jaguar is a work of computational poetry, printed bookwork, and virtual embodiment. Written between 2018–2019, the project explores sluthood, queer kinship, and migratory identity through shape-shifting metaphors of plants, beasts, and fugitive desires. It was first published through a Kickstarter campaign and printed in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, on soft, beige paper, with no author name on the cover.
The absence of authorship was intentional. The poems were never mine. Like wind through bone, language moved through me. The book was designed as an anonymous vessel: imperfect, recycled, textured like a tea-stained shirt or a vintage tennis shoe. It felt broken-in before it even reached your hands, a book that had already lived a few lives. It insisted on being read as shared flesh.
Form, here, was never secondary. The writing process blurred formal constraint and structural listening: “Form is to function, what context is to content, what medium is to message, what stretching is to dancing.” The jaguar, fast, fugitive, elusive, became the central metaphor. Each poem chased it. Each form caught its shadow.
The poems were ethical in their vulnerability. They spoke of sex and god and tenderness with equal heat. They asked the reader to meet them on a cellular level, with gut and muscle. To be seen not as thinkers or voters or children of God, but as beasts in flight.
The titular jaguar eventually took literal form. Using Quill, I created a looping VR illustration of a flying jaguar — inviting viewers to enter the poem’s motion directly. Rendered as a speculative creature in perpetual ascent, the jaguar hovered above the book like a spirit-guide. This was more than illustration. It was an afterlife. The virtual cat became a counter-memory, a silent poem the body could inhabit. Together, book and beast became a portal. A collection not to be read, but to be ridden.