The frontispiece of Eunoia 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. Eunoia 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, all 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.