The Xenotext

“While mind-uploading and cryonics remain as fanciful as a ghostbot would have seemed a quarter century ago, technologies like gene-editing and biohacking, the ones that are most germane to The Xenotext, have arrived.” – Ryan Ruby, Now Voyager

“The Xenotext: Book 2 is the culminating second half of Christian Bök’s 25-year Xenotext project … Listen for the epic music, the otherworldly imagery, and the poignant – more so for being heavily constrained – human sentiments.” – Brent Raycroft, ARC Poetry

“In this audacious work – arguably the world’s first example of “living poetry” – the poet and Leeds Beckett University professor Christian Bök chronicles the completion of his 25-year experiment, in which he used a “chemical alphabet” to encode a sonnet into the genome of the almost indestructible bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans – which can survive radiation, acid, freezing and even outer space. Miraculously, the microbe “writes” a poem back. Although his text is shadowed with apocalyptic gloom, Bök stokes a romantic idea: that poetry might live in more than just our hearts, perhaps even outliving humanity itself.” – The Observer’s books of the year 2025

“While civilizations in the future may look back upon the germ that contains The Xenotext and see there one of the last vestiges of our culture, The Xenotext today forces us to consider the “poetics” of the genetic code and, by extension, the poetry that might be buried within the origins of life itself.” – Dashiel Carrera, Los Angeles Review of Books

”[W]ell worth the price just for the the acrobatics and anagrams and sonnets, for the way it remixes science and fiction and the classic canon.” – Peter Watts

“With The Xenotext, Book 2, Bök now ends a 25-year project with even stricter constraints: embedding a poem in the genes of a living bacterium that, when genetically transcribed, produces a corresponding poem, both of which can be genetically replicated without error, ad infinitum.” – Tom Bowden, The Book Beat

Praise for the author:

“The Xenotext is equal parts revelation and revolution. Absolutely staggering.” – Peter Watts

“Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bok has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials.” – The Guardian

“Christian Bok’s The Xenotext, a poem in DNA mutation, continues his attempts to redefine what poetry even is.” – The National Post

“Bök’s dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.” – The Times

“A resounding success…brilliant.” – The Guardian

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), his first book of poetry, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Nature has interviewed Bök about his work on The Xenotext. Bök has also exhibited artworks derived from The Xenotext at galleries around the world; moreover, his poem from this project has hitched a ride, as a digital payload, aboard a number of probes exploring the Solar System (including the InSight lander, now at Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars). Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds School of Arts in the UK.

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