Dear Readers,
I am thrilled to welcome you to the inaugural issue of the html review, an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web.
Every year we will publish works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic storytelling, and experiments that rely on the web as medium. the html review was started out of a yearning for more outlets comfortable with pieces built for our screens, writing that leverages our computational networked tools, both new and old, for the art of language, narrative, and exploration.
This initial gathering features an incredible array of writers and artists, a mixture of old and new friends bringing different perspectives to this framing.
We have a meditative Wordle poem from interdisciplinary artist May-Li Khoe, an epic alt-text image web-browsing travelogue from Lan Zhang & Anna Garbier, and a contemplative computational poem from computer scientist and writer Katy Ilonka Gero.
Author Larissa Pham, whose web poems and essays partially inspired this journal, contributes a miniaturized supernova of text and code. Everest Pipkin takes us on a journey through browsing, togetherness, and trust using the “somewhat outdated (and rather unstable) web technology of iframes.”
All the way from a locked-down Shanghai, Yuzhu Chai guides us mid-air through our in-flight entertainment options. Eloisa Amezcua, who just last week released her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like A Wife, animates the spoken text of boxer Bobby Chacon into a video-poetic form. From Jayson P. Smith, we have a monument of a sonnet.
Todd Anderson, who hosts the great celebration of language and technology Wordhack at Babycastles every month, constructs a beautiful memorial and shrine to a departed friend. Last but very much not least, Nick Montfort, founder and editor of online literary magazine Taper and experimental publisher Bad Quarto, shows us the beauty and poetry of progress bars.
Finally, the table of contents and home for this issue was designed and coded by our brilliant Artistic Director Shelby Wilson, who bends simple code into an array of windows, blinds, and doors.
I hope the html review can join the ecosystem of publications and institutions that have inspired us and be a fruitful playground and incubator for writers, artists, and technologists of any orientation. We will be opening submissions in September and would love to see anything you might have in store for us.
Thank you for joining us on this first step.
Love and gratitude,
Maxwell Neely-Cohen
April 2022