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Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He lives in Toronto. Excerpts from this book have appeared over the years in the following publications: Arras, Big Allis, Blood and Aphorisms (b+a), Open Letter, Queen Street Quarterly, Sulfur and Blues and True Concussions: Six New Toronto Poets (House of Anansi Press, 1996). Financial assistance has been kindly provided over the years by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. The epigraph by William Hayley owes its presence in this book to the gracious courtesy of Steve McCaffery. COVER IMAGE: ‘Of Yellow’ is a polychromatic transcription of the sonnet ‘Voyelle’ by Arthur Rimbaud. Vowels have been replaced with blocks of colour according to the schema described in the sonnet itself: ‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles’. All other letters, commas and spaces are grey. The image has appeared on the cover of Sulfur 44 (Spring 1999). FRONTISPIECE: ‘Vowels Swivel’ is a nested set of transparent geometric solids (each one generated by rotating a given vowel around a vertical axis): A (cone); E (cylinder); I (line); O (sphere); U (paraboloid).
Flash Design: Brian Kim Stephans
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