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Random Acts of Poetry 6: “Eunoia” by Christian Bok

I read Eunoia on a plane going east and then I wrote a review of it:

by Christian Bök (Coach House) is a
draw­ing of a cone, a line, a sphere and a parab­o­loid, all nes­tled
inside a cylin­der. This com­pli­cated arrange­ment of lines and points
illus­trates per­fectly how my mind worked while I was read­ing this
book.
is divided into five chap­ters, one for each of the
five vow­els, and each chap­ter tells an out­landish story writ­ten with
words that con­tain only that vowel. If the cylin­der in the
illus­tra­tion rep­re­sents the sto­ries them­selves, the lines and
pat­terns rep­re­sent all the other ele­ments I noticed as I read. Part
of my mind took in the action of the sto­ries, and at the same time I
looked at each word — many of which I sel­dom see or per­haps have never
seen before — with a new appre­ci­a­tion of the power it had even
though it con­tained only one vowel. As I fin­ished each chap­ter I
thought about the fact that, as the author assures us in the
intro­duc­tion,
the words in English that have only that
vowel were con­tained in those few pages. And there was even more going
on: each chap­ter had its own rhythm, the most harsh being Chapter A
with all those stac­cato short “a” sounds like “a fla­grant back­lash as
ram­pant as a vandal’s wrath,” and the soft­est being the dull sounds
of Chapter U, in which “Duluth dump trucks lurch.” This book was fun to
read. It engaged me com­pletely and relieved my fear that I could no
longer think about more than one thing at a time.

Here's a taste.

And here's Bok reading (although I think it's more fun to read these poems to yourself):

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