This “tiny tale of tourism between bodies” is a poetic narrative about an alien being that teleports into a human body and what ensues. This poem is structured into 123 lines and 121 background images with titles, and allows readers to play through the work on a fairly rapid schedule or use arrows to navigate from line to line, image to image. Clicking on the screen repositions the text, which may allow readers to move the text to a more readable space on the photograph, but otherwise doesn’t seem to contribute much to the content.
Speaking of which, the gorgeous photography focuses on details that make the familiar world strange, a sense reinforced by the caption given to each photograph. This sense of alienation from the familiar is echoed by the lines of the poem as they tell the story of the alien-human character intermixing technical and scientific diction with more familiar language choices. Together, the images, caption, and text teleport us into the mind of a speaker whose relationship to his body and the world around him has been transformed.
With this poem, Jhave offers us an alternative perspective similar to that sought by Martianism, best exemplified by Craig Raine’s famous poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.”