Christian Bök

Since 2017, Bök has been working on a visual poetry project inspired by Suprematist Composition: White on White by Kazimir Malevich. This project culminated in the publication of a book titled The Kazimir Effect (Penteract Press, 2021), which was listed as one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year 2021.

In 2015, The Xenotext: Book I was published. This first volume, consisting of meditations on science, poetry, human intervention, and myth, “sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself.”The Xenotext: Book II remains forthcoming.

Bök is collaborating with laboratories at the University of Calgary, DNA 2.0, and the University of Wyoming to realize his design. In 2011, nine years after conceiving The Xenotext experiment, Bök announced the university’s labs had performed a successful test run of his “poetic cipher,” meaning that:

On May 31, 2011, The BBC World Service broadcast Bök reading "The Xenotext."

The Xenotext is an ongoing work of BioArt which claims to be “the first example of ‘living poetry.’” The central experiment is twofold: first, a poem is encoded as a sequence of DNA which is then implanted into a viable bacterium; second, the bacterium reads this sequence of DNA and produces a protein that, according to the initial cipher, is also an intelligible poem. The final product, according to Bök in a 2007 interview, will include:

In 2006, Christian Bök and his work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet, produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.

Bök's poem "Vowels" was used in the lyrics of a song on the EP A Quick Fix of Melancholy (2003) by the Norwegian band Ulver.

Bök is most famous for Eunoia (2001), a book which took him seven years to write. Eunoia consists of univocalics: The book uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters. In the book's main part, each chapter used just a single vowel, producing sentences such as this: "Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech." Bök believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."

Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and published by Coach House Books, in 2001, Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin and sold 20,000 copies. Canongate published "Eunoia" in Britain in Oct. 2008. The book was also a bestseller there, reaching #8 on the Top 10 bestselling charts for the year.

In 1994, Bök published Crystallography, "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology." The Village Voice said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself." Crystallography was reissued in 2003, and was nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award.

He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler-Henry. As of 2005 he teaches at the University of Calgary. As of 2022 He teaches at Charles Darwin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Christian Bök, FRSC (/bʊk/; born August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian poet known for unusual and experimental works. He is the author of Eunoia, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.