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The Xenotext: Book 2
Paperback
Publisher Price: $19.95
ISBN13: 9781552454985
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: Jun 3 2025
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.60 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia.
Christian Bök in Book 1 of The Xenotext outlined his plan to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text durable enough to outlive any apocalypse, surviving until the death of the Sun itself. After more than two decades of effort, Bök has, at last, succeeded at this incredible experiment, and Book 2 of The Xenotext situates his enterprise within the deep time of the cosmos.
Bök rehearses some of the techniques likely to be used in the future to preserve the cultural heritage of our civilization against a potential planetary disaster (be it thermonuclear warfare or astrophysical barrage); moreover, Bök speculates that, buried within the biochemistry of Life itself, there really does exist an innate beauty, if not a hidden poetry - a literal message that we might read, if we deign to seek it.
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