Author: Christian Bök
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770564349
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
Author: Christian Bök
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 9781552451199
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
"'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' This book of avant-garde literature features the intersection of poetry and science, and explores the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Christian Bök
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847672442
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
'Eunoia', which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, Eunoia is as playful as it is awe-inspiring.
Author: David O’Meara
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770566767
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 97
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD 2022 WINNER OF THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARD 2022 Words like radio waves, bouncing off the spectres of mortality, middle age, and the mundane. Arriving at middle age was a decisive experience for David O’Meara, standing equidistant to the past and future with its accompanying doubts and anticipations, inviting re-evaluation of past goals, confronting personal loss, and the death of his father and friends. These are the masses on radar, indistinct but detectable existential presences encroaching, and in the center of the radar is the lyric 'I' sweeping its adjacent experience. Poems like "I Carry a Mouse to the Park Beside the Highway," "I Keep One Eye Open and One Eye Closed," and "I Sleep as the Volcano Ash Falls like Snow,” usher the reader through thematic corridors of memory, fracture, and recovery. Embracing uncertainty and incorporating seasonal forecasts, humour, trivia, satire, politics, the environment, loss, and the mundane, these poems are a detection system signaling a paradox of meanings.' "Masses on Radar exhibits a stunning mastery of poetic craft. O’Meara has the talent and technique to turn almost anything into riveting poetry, but these poems do not coast: they dig deep, bringing to vivid life a remarkable array of subjects, experiences, emotions, and interior worlds. These poems summon quotidian encounters, sometimes conferring them with unexpected beauty, sometimes breathing new and sudden problems into them. O’Meara’s sparse language lifts the veil on our human failings, the limits of our vision, and in so doing satisfies." – Archibald Lampman Award Judges
Author: Nora Castle
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031416953
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Author: Johanna Skibsrud
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228003059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
This book aims to expand our sense of poetry's reach and potential impact. It is an effort at recouping the poetic imperative buried within the first taxonomic description of human being: "nosce te ipsum," or "know yourself." Johanna Skibsrud explores both poetry and human being not as fixed categories but as active processes of self-reflection and considers the way that human being is constantly activated within and through language and thinking. By examining a range of modern and contemporary poets including Wallace Stevens, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Anne Carson, all with an interest in playfully disrupting sense and logic and eliciting unexpected connections, The Poetic Imperative highlights the relationship between the practice of writing and reading and a broad tradition of speculative thought. It also seeks to demonstrate that the imperative "know yourself" functions not only as a command to speak and listen, but also as a call to action and feeling. The book argues that poetic modes of knowing - though central to poetry understood as a genre - are also at the root of any conscious effort to move beyond the subjective limits of language and selfhood in the hopes of touching upon the unknown. Engaging and erudite, The Poetic Imperative is an invitation to direct our attention simultaneously to the finite and embodied limits of selfhood, as well as to what those limits touch: the infinite, the Other, and truth itself.
Author: Ursula Heise
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317660196
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 507
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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues. Sections cover: The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities Inequality and Environmental Justice Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies The State of the Environmental Humanities The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.
Author: Nikki Skillman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to articulate a vision of human consciousness that is both scientifically informed and poetically truthful. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain examines several contemporary poets—Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and experimentalists such as Harryette Mullen and Tan Lin—to discern what new language, poetic forms, and depictions of selfhood this perplexity forces into being. Nikki Skillman shows that under the sway of physiological conceptions of mind, poets ascribe ever less agency to the self, ever less transformative potential to the imagination. But in readings that unravel factional oppositions in contemporary American poetry, Skillman argues that the lyric—a genre accustomed to revealing expansive aesthetic possibilities within narrow formal limits—proves uniquely positioned to register and redeem the dispersals of human mystery that loom in the age of the brain.
Author: Christian Bök
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770562591
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002) Stunning and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram. 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 chapteris 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 new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bok and an expanded afterword. 'Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' —Samuel Delany 'Eunoia takes the lipogram and rendersit obsolete.' —Kenneth Goldsmith 'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' —Harry Mathews 'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' —Charles Bernstein '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
Author: Christian Bök
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781552453575
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Incarnations showcases twenty years of Eyre's uniquely performative portraits deconstructing what it means to be a thinker, woman, and subject.Incarnations is the first collection to make accessible a representative body of work by one of Canada's most original, provocative, and internationally acclaimed photographers. Spanning the artist's seven major series dating from 1993 to 2013, Incarnations showcases and celebrates the theatricality and carnivalesque abandon that has become the hallmark of Eyre's portraits. With contributions from renowned Canadian poets, playwrights, and novelists including Christian B�k, Lynn Crosbie, and RM Vaughan, as well as the Chicago Tribune's Lori Waxman, Incarnations highlights the ways, as James D. Campbell writes, '[Eyre] stops us in our tracks at every juncture with the stark, hallucinatory clarity of her visual language.'
