Rice

Rice is an "award winning group of sixteen poems about a trip to Vietnam are organized hypertextually as a cluster of images of little odds and ends: a candy wrapper, a ticket, photograph, and so on. Each image will lead you to poems, short Shockwave animations, visual poems, hypertexts, a set of images, all experiences that will lead you to reflect on the politics, poverty, and culture of Vietnam.

This 1998 group of poems exemplifies the aesthetics of the early Web, when webpages felt much more like assembled bits and pieces of electronic objects, organized by links, tables, and frames. In this poem, Jenny Weight (aka geniwate) makes effective use of frames to juxtapose a sequence of stanzas about rooms in a hotel in Hue where Western women: two screaming, one gorging herself on Western food— all in the palace-rich capital of imperial Vietnam. She also provides a link (the image of a fork) that opens the index in the central frame, allowing us to experience the other parts of the poem framed by two stanzas about screaming women— one revolted by Vietnamese men, another by politics — perhaps a metaphor for the poet's experience of Vietnam." -- Leonardo Flores, I Love E-Poetry