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Christian Bök’s Eunoia has had twelve reprints and sold 11,000 copies since its publication in 2001, a phenomenal success story by Canadian standards. He is the author of the acclaimed Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut. Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Bök’s conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the Poetry Plastique exhibit. He has also created artificial languages for the TV shows, Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters).

Eunoia 2002 Canadian Winner

Coach House Books, Canada

Judges’ Citation

Christian Bök has made an immensely attractive work from those ‘corridors of the breath’ we call vowels, giving each in turn its dignity and manifest, making all move to the order of his own recognition and narrative.

Christian Bök has made an immensely attractive work from those ‘corridors of the breath’ we call vowels, giving each in turn its dignity and manifest, making all move to the order of his own recognition and narrative. Both he and they are led to delightfully, unexpected conclusions as though the world really were what we made of it. As we are told at the outset, ‘Eunoia, which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels.’ Here each speaks with persistent, unequivocal voice, all puns indeed intended.