Eunoia

by Christian Bok

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552452257
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	08/31/2009
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	139,640
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 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.

Editorial Reviews

' Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' – Samuel Delany, author of The Einstein Intersection

'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' – Harry Mathews, author of The New Tourism and My Life in the CIA

'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' – Charles Bernstein, author of Attack of the Difficult Poems and Girly Man

'Bök's dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.' – The Times

'A resounding success ... brilliant.' – The Guardian

'Brilliant ... beautiful and strange.' – Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

'Impressive.' – Sunday Telegraph

'No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it's an ingenious little novel ... playful and irreverent ... charming.' – Metro

From the Publisher

Canadian experimental poet Bök's Eunoia, first published in 2001, is already legendary. In it, Bök devotes a chapter to each vowel, using only that vowel as well as a handful of other rules and restrictions, to create series of poems that push the English language to limits and possibilities no one knew it had. This new edition reprints the entire original book and adds a section of new poems that comment on the original project or take up other alphabetical themes (“And Sometimes,” for instance, uses only English words with the letter Y and no other vowels). What at first seems like a game turns out to be a means of unlocking a kind of hidden nature of the English language: the vowels, it turns out, each have their own moods and environments revealed by their repeated use. “A law as harsh as a fatwa bans/ all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark,” reads the first poem. The vowels inspire, if in fact they don't contain, stories of their own. The E chapter narrates a war-story about Greeks worthy of Homer: “When the rebels beset defended trenches,/ the defenders retrench themselves, then strengthen/ the embedded defenses.” This book is jaw-droppingly powerful, a mythology of sound. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly