In Writing Machines (2002), N. Katherine Hayles argues for electronic textuality, a condition of text that includes “signifying components” such as “sound, an-imation, motion, video, kinesthetic involvements, and software functionality” (20). Calling her approach to analyzing non-print texts “media-specific analy-sis” (29?31), she broadens the scope of literary criticism to attend to interac-tion common in hypertextual works where the user-audience experiences a text by kinesthetically combining and recombining lexias of text made possible through computer programming language and code. Such recombinatory structuring, according to Bill Seamen, allows a type of poetics where each “me-dia-element . . . convey[s] its own field of meaning” and the user-audience “be-comes dynamically involved in the construction of meaning” (Seamen, “Re-combinant” 157?158). I refer to this recombinatory quality of text as rhapsodic textuality. While Hayles and Seamen theorize specifically about digital texts, we see this mechanism at work in ancient, epic literature where units of texts and whole episodes are believed to have been stitched together in performance by singers, known in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, as rhapsodes. Derived from the Greek word rhapsodein (????????), meaning “to sew songs together,” rhap-sody today implies a musical improvisation, one relayed episodically yet main-taining narrative integrity for the audience. I argue in this essay that Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) is, like Homeric epic poetry, rhapsodic and that this quality of textuality constitutes the work’s poetics. Scholars and critics have long identified Patchwork Girl as one of the major works of electronic literature. In “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” (2016) Hayles herself hailed it as “important and impressive” and called it “a culminating work for the classical period [of hypertext literature]” (200).