Individual Work
Mandrake Vehicles

This Flash-based creation encompasses a series of three prose poems that gradually dissolve (in animated sequences) to reveal poems "hidden" within them. Each of three initial block texts can be read sequentially; however, the essence of this piece is the way letters fly from those initial texts to reveal the hidden poems. Each of these three initial texts have two poems "embedded" in them. At first, the remaining letters remain in place, like the buildings that survived the earthquake. On subsequent pages, these characters close ranks to form the words of the embedded poems. Additionally, each surviving letter casts off versions of itself which fall down the surface of the poem, colliding with other cast-off versions and forming alternate unused words which stack up in a heap below the poem. Thematically, the pieces bring together the "famous occult associations of the European mandrake" with the American one (mayapple). The poems play with the rhizomatic nature of roots and rhizomes of literary allusions. Readers cannot uproot these mandrakes without being caught in the underground tangle of sex, death, and renewal.

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