This exquisitely designed site contains poetry in several modes: in lines of verse, as visual poetry, and as an e-poem that responds to the reader’s symbolic presence in the text: the pointer. The site is conceptualized “as a grave” made of [web] pages, words “flung to the far corners / of the earth” (quoted from the site manifesto). Each page consists of images and words arranged and offer the reader two ways of viewing the composition: discover (which keeps links hidden for reader to explore the surface of the image for them) and unearth (which provides a sepia tone for the background and reveals the links in the text, along with useful labels for them). Verbally it is also a collage of voices: from the victims to the pilot of the Enola Gay, who delivered the bomb in Hiroshima.
This work is a powerful memorial to those lost in Hiroshima (and by extension Nagasaki). Simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, factual and ironic, the work reminds us of the very human side to the event and its aftermath.
Featured in Poems That GO.
