LITMIR.BIZ

Christian is one of the world's most well-known conceptual poets. Crystallography brought a scientific rigour and sensibility to poetry, while Eunoia was an Oulipian exercise in severe constraint and a radical experiment in language. Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and has sold 35,000 copies in North America. The Xenotext is a kind of experiment – a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu. Christian Bök is in the process of composing a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form.This is the first volume, of two, about The Xenotext. It will include Christian’s writings about and around the experiment; there is a long poem about the hellish origins of life on Earth, a series of writings and texts that will introduce the reader to the basics of genetics, amino acids and helices, complete with numerous illustrations. It sets the groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself.The experiment has been going on for more than ten years, and has already received media attention from BBC, Harper's, The Guardian, Maclean's, as well as from the scientific and literary communities.

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The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008. This edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword.

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