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):