Eunoia

by Christian Bok (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $11.72

  'Eunoia', which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, Eunoia is as playful as it is awe-inspiring.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.49

  Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes --Harry Matthews. Eunoia is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means beautiful thinking. EUNOIA is a universal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo--the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints--the text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express uncanny thought. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this work of literature is an exemplary monument for 21st-century poetry --Charles Bernstein.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $16.48

  The word 'eunoia, ' which literally means 'beautiful thinking, ' is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l'Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), a French writers' group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram - the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!).

  Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times' top ten books of 2008.

  This edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bok and an expanded afterword.