Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. "A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes"--Harry Matthews. "Eunoia" is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means "beautiful thinking." EUNOIA is a universal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo--the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints--the text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express uncanny thought. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this work of literature is "an exemplary monument for 21st-century poetry"--Charles Bernstein.

Author Hometown: CALGARY, AB CAN



About the author: Christian Bök is the author of CRYSTALLOGRAPHY (Coach House Books, 1994), a "pataphysical encyclopedia" nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His book EUNOIA won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and is the best-selling Canadian poetry book of all time. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary.

Reviews:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article6831193.ece
http://jacketmagazine.com/23/perlof-oulip.html