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Product Description
Product Description
Published in 1994, Crystallography was a gem of a book, an instant hit that was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.
'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring 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. As Bök himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.
Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.
About the Author
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a ’pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut. ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2001. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchleyís Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary.
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How much is one fantastic, comprehensible, and yet on the surface bizarre sentence worth to you? In entertainment or inspiration or education? I'd say--for me-- a dollar at least, and five at most. Applying that standard, this book is worth hundreds of dollars. I'm no intellectual, and I'm no freak, but I like language and words, and I like this book a lot.
The linguistic "games" that I found most interesting were the classification of letters by their axis of symmetry and the "dripping line" (think of water dripping from a cave ceiling). (Unfortunately the web removes multiple spaces so it is not easy to give an illustration - just think of fewer and fewer letters falling into the next line, always spelling out meaningful clauses, phrases, words.)
This book is a major tour-de-force of experimental writing. It will get under your skin. You'll read and reread digging deep to find the underlying principles. You may even become obsessed. Or you may read through it quickly dismissing it as a mere experiment.
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