In Small & Large Pieces
In Small & Large Pieces is a short poetic hypertext fiction, a gothic angle of “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. This work interacts with the reader through making them keep using the “return key”. This way the work keeps the reader actively focused on what is happening through the six chapters:
Chapter 1: The Effect of Living Backwards
Chapter 2: Injury & Breakage
Chapter 3: Anna, Phantomwise
Chapter 4: The Unified Parent
Chapter 5: Scrambled Eggs
Chapter 6: The Mirror Shattered
All together this poetry collection contains 13 short, lyrical poems.
Readers are encouraged to “hit return to continue,” which will take them to the prefatory material and then on to the six chapters sequentially
Published in issue 1:3 of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994), Kathryn Cramer’s short poetic hypertext fiction, “In Small & Large Pieces” came bundled with Kathy Mac’s “Unnatural Habitats”, first as two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh and PC, and later on a single CD-ROM requiring 2 MB RAM and a hard disk drive. A “dark fantasy” and “postmodern Through the Looking Glass” (folio back cover), Cramer’s work aligns with numerous remediations of Alice in Wonderland in contemporary history of art, narrative, and digital culture. The titular broken looking glass becomes a metaphor of “obsessive fragmentation” (blurb) throughout the text, and of how readers move between different types of texts, such as poems, hand-written notes, and captioned images “illuminates this moment of shattered self” (ibid).
