| View Larger Image | Crystallography | Paperbackby Christian Bok (Author)
| List Price: | $14.95 | | Price: | $9.25 | | You Save: | $5.70 (38%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Coach House Press | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 158 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 20, 2003 | | Sales Rank: | 408,108th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Can’t get enough of Bök’s books? Well, this first book of Bök’s is back! 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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 3 reviews)
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If you like words and like sounds, you'll love this by Carl G. (California)  5 Stars
December 27, 2008
I forget what I paid for it--$12? $16? Something like that. Cheap. It has paragraphs you'll never read anywhere else, using long strings of words that have never before been next to one another. It's a testament to what can be done--because Christian Bok did it--if one goes off in a hole somewhere and focuses, and that's a good lesson any ol' time.
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.
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5 star exploration of language; 2 star poetry by M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA)  3 Stars
August 11, 2007
This is a fascinating book exploring language through crystallography that fits nicely into the Oupilo experiments. In general the book is accessible - word squares, concrete poems, charts and, yes, some poetry as "commonly understood." The most personal poems are under "Diamonds" which explores the relationship with his father, a diamond cutter. The layout of the poems in this section remains a puzzle to me. As I do Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover", I found myself wanting a crib sheet to point out what I felt I was missing of the author's intent.
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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Best book ever! by Andrew Wilcox (Burbank, CA USA) 5 Stars
September 21, 2005
I am a geology major and I usually tend to avoid poetry, however, this book is quite an exception. This book took the science of geology and the art of poetry and combined them into a masterpiece. This analysis of these two fields of study is incredible and is a definite must read.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Eunoia
by Christian Bok (Author)
The word eunoia, which literally means beautiful thinking, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (lOuvroir de Littrature 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...
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| A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Fourth Edition
by Tom Phillips (Author)
In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs's "cut-up" writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three pence—W. H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970. The artist writes, "I plundered, mined, and undermined...
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| The Arab Apocalypse
by Etel Adnan (Author), Etel Adnan (Illustrator), Simone Fattal (Illustrator)
This is a masterwork of the dislocations and radiant outcries of the Arab World... The Arab Apocalypse is an immersion into a rapture of chaos clawing toward destiny, a nullified hope refusing its zero. It is also the journey of a soul through the cartography of a global immediacy rarely registered by maps, replete with signposts like hieroglyphs in a storm of shrapnel and broken glass. And above all it is a book that, though capable of being read in its orderly sequence, has so surrendered...
| | | Crowd and not evening or light
by Leslie Scalapino (Author)
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| Girl's Life, A
by Johanna Drucker (Author), Susan Bee (Author)
A graphic melodrama of romance, crime, and passion, "A Girl's Life" addresses adolescent angst in all of its fashionably gory details. The snares and pitfalls of contemporary life, which all girls must struggle to survive, are here revealed through darkly comic and fiendishly noir prose, accompanied by lurid collages and unusual typography.
By Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker. 7 x 10 in.
40 color illustrations
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