Crystallography: Book 1 of Information Theory

by Christian Bök

Poetry. Second, revised edition. One of the ongoing misfortunes of small press publishing is that even much talked-about books of poetry often go out of print quickly, and stay out of print. But Coach House has reissued Christian Bok's remarkable CRYSTALLOGRAPHY (1994) for a new decade of readers. "CRYSTALLOGRAPHY is quite literally a groundbreaking book of poems. Here crystals come alive in a dramatic interplay of optic anomalies that magnify vision. I love this book!"—Marjorie Perloff. Book is the author of the bestselling EUNOIA (also available from SPD), which won the Griffin Price for Poetic Excellence in 2002.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, Canada, Science, Art, Canadian Literature

105 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 1994

About the author

Christian Bök (born Christian Book) is a Canadian experimental poet. He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler-Henry.

In addtion to his poetry, Bök has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.

As of 2005, he teaches at the University of Calgary.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

200710: this five does not mean i understand it all, but as with philosophy i enjoy not understanding. i am not scientific but my father was and i can follow the early work on crystals because he was chemical physics prof fascinated by liquid crystals, then the later work on fractals because that was his second-to last interest (last was non-linear dynamics), so i wish he were around to talk about this. on the other, he was often dismissive of artists trying to grasp science. i find the language engaging though it is its own argument that poetry does not translate. there would have to be entirely other words maybe translated in say french... but japanese...

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, might just sneak into my top 10 reads of the year. Poetry, who knew? Actually it reminded me of David Eagleman's "Sum - 40 Tales From The Afterlife"

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must have read this book just before I started on goodreads. My favorite poem in the book is the one that begins

Fractals are haphazard maps
that entrap entropy in tropes.

Fractals tell their raconteurs
to counteract at every point
the contours of what thought
recounts (a line, a plot): recant
the chronicle that cannot coil
into itself & let the story stray
off course, its countless details,
pointless detours, all en route
toward a tour de force, where
the here & now of nowhere is.

Don't ramble -- lest you dream
about a random belt of words
brought to you by Mandelbrot.

There's some fun play with the idea of letters as elements that make up word molecules. The end of the book is an invented history that talks about monks and mirrors-- clearly an homage to Borges.

[Nicole Fegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

when i took my college english/writing class on gertrude stein, most of the poems i wrote ended up being about math - math was to me as objects were to stein - and the professor recommended this to me as something i might really enjoy, and she was right. this collection really expertly tackles the relationships between crystals and language and geometry and life, which i'm sure aren't philosophical questions everyone's interested in, but i had a hell of a time

[Ken Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am unable to overstate the influence of this particular volume of poetry upon my own poetic practice and my way-of-writing in general. Reading this book altered the trajectory of my academic, philosophical, and personal pursuits. The sheer precision of each page cuts into the eye with a welcome surgery, excising cataracts built up by years of exposure to the mediocre, middling, and muddled poetry of the mainstream. If you give them a little time, these poems will hone your reader's eye. Despite the tongue-intoxicating labyrinths of Eunoia and the earth-rattling impacts of The Xenotext, I find myself returning most often to this book, to its desperation symmetry.

[Michal Tallo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"thieves here leave no trace of their
crime, not even the theft of the item.

reset all rocks dislodged underfoot.
brush back into place each cobweb
of thought as you pass through it.
be like the breeze with fireflies in it.

biodegradation is slowed in the cave
so that you are as good as immortal."

[Patrick Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not huge on poetry. It mostly gives me embarrassment chills. But this was easily one of the most interesting poetry books I’ve ever seen. So weird and scientific and surprisingly insightful and personal. Really something!

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not normally intimidated by mere poetry. Even when confused or dumbfounded, I always think, "Well, they're only words, after all." But I might have met my match with Crystallography. Never once, while reading this many (ahem) faceted book of poems, did I think to myself, "Well, they're only words, after all." More often I felt, "I am reading a book that has been written by an alien."

Alien can mean foreign (and in fact it wasn't too many years ago, maybe a hundred or so, when it meant nothing but) but I do not mean it to mean foreign. I mean it to mean alien, as we've come to understand the word today: a being, a creature, a thing that (who?) has come here from somewhere else, some other nook of the vast universe. I mean to say that I felt, while reading the supposedly English words upon the certainly Canadian paper that made up the book of poems called Crystallography, I often felt, or rather thought, "I am reading a book that has been written by an alien."

I had the (sublime) pleasure of actually watching the author read some of his poems (and poems of DaDaists and others) outloud recently and I must say that though I've seen many things in my life, I have never seen anything like what it was I saw the night I watched the author, the alien, read to us from the poems he brought. Some of it was mind-mutilating. Others of its was simply ear-shattering. It would not have made for good dinner theatre but it was a (soul) smashing performance. And Crystallography is a ripping read. Plus, it is the only book of poetry I've ever known to have a plasticine page in its middle, like a crystallic centerfold or an alien advert.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The syllabus for undergraduate biology students "highly recommends" that students purchase the perennial classic Henderson's Dictionary of Biology. These are the words of life, but science is an island of vocabulary. Our technical language is precise, beautiful, and highly enmeshed. In Crystallography, Bök provides a survey of scientific knowledge and terminology, relating the language of crystallography to the English language as a whole. His poems, read aloud, comprise perfect inflections. Consonants and vowels are chosen with a careful ear. It is a comfort to read poetry that is so sensitive to the scientific perspective. The double-columned poems are grating and corny at times; those written as standard verse are, in contrast, scintillating.

[Jim Elkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the moment, Bök is probably one of the two most-read conceptual writers in English; the other is Kenneth Goldsmith, who is thanked in the book. "Eunoia" is a more consistent book, but raises some of the same issues.

Four reactions to this book, arranged pseudo-scientifically, like Bök's arrangements, leading from local to larger-scale issues.

1. The ghost of Escher

From an art historical or art critical point of view, it's a bad sign that the book begins with a page-long quotation from Escher, who has invariably been a sign of a certain misunderstanding of modernisms and postmodernisms. Escher is popular with chemists—he still appears in introductory textbooks, which is appropriate for this book—but not with people engaged with current possibilities of the image. From an expressive standpoint, the epigraph signals the likelihood that Bök will be engrossed in structural games, and that those games and rules might owe more to Escher's kind of compulsive mathematized imagination than to concerns that stem from Oulipo or conceptual poetry.

There are a number of passages in the book where Bök's games seem compulsive in Escher's particular, emotionally stunted, myopically neurotic, algorithmically limited, aesthetically adolescent fashion. Even in the graphics—especially the mylar graphic—it's not possible to imagine much other than an author unreflectively obsessing about the placement of X's in page-layout software. (What is the difference between Escher's unpleasantly narrow experiments, which have exiled him from the narratives of modernism, and Roussel's wonderfully narrow experiments, which have put him at the center of stories about modernism?)

2. The role of crystallography

I come at this book with some knowledge of crystallography: I know Haüy, Bravais, birefringence, and crystal classes. I'm aware that bringing a specialized knowledge to a book that does not demand that knowledge of its readers is risky and usually irrelevant. (I'm also aware that the book isn't about crystallography.) But this knowledge does yield several things that are pertinent to a general reading.

(a) I can see how, in some sections, Bök is trying to find verbal equivalents to crystallographic facts, and fails. The way he fails is significant. In the poem "Birefringence," he tries to conjure interference colors by comparing them to stained glass, "gasoline rainbows," "iridescent / insects," and several other things. The result, for someone who knows the colors, is insufficient; and for someone who doesn't, the result is scattered in an illegible fashion: that is, the illegibility appears to be rule-driven and its obscurity related to language games, but actually it is caused by limitations in the author's descriptive power.

(b) In the poem on Miller, Bök makes what I experience as a half-hearted attempt to conjure Miller indices (comparing them to the Dewey decimal system): what matters is that I can see this is half-hearted, because of the impossibility of conjuring something like Miller's system: Bök knows the attempt is tepid, but that he doesn't need to be more precise because his readers will not judge that aspect of the book—but poems like the one on Miller demonstrate how loosely he regards his crystallographic master metaphor: a looseness that is not at all projected by the book. I wonder if the book could have been even stronger if he had found a way to signal the looseness of his attachment to his non-poetic sources.

(c) Specialist knowledge is also pertinent because the book's appeal should not, even from Bök's point of view, depend on the hundreds of polysyllabic technical terms: their exoticism and opacity can't be the central strength or indispensable strategy of the book. When those terms aren't opaque (for readers who know some crystallography), they reveal themselves more clearly as inexact references chosen in accord with very loose criteria: they are used to suggest global parallels with some poetics, or to provide Greek- or Latin-sounding obstructions to the text.

(Incidentally, there is a similarity between Bök's taste in crystallographic illustration and mine. When I first read this book I suspected he had taken two illustrations from a book of mine, "Domain of Images," which has a chapter of crystallography, which is also, like this book, one of the few texts on crystallography that is not intended as a contribution to science. Bök reproduces two very obscure images I also have in my book on pp. 119 and 129. But Bök's book was published in 1994, before mine, so it's evidence of a similar sense of what counts as an interesting crystallographic image.)

3. Emotional passages

There is one section of the book, "Diamonds" (p. 64), that is self-contained and different from the rest of the book. "Diamonds" purports to be about the author's father, a diamond cutter. It is affectively direct, and scientifically minimal. It isn't a flaw, in a book about flaws, to have a section that's separate: but it is problematic to have that difference consist in directly emotional and even confessional prose, and to have that direct appeal to feeling be tied to a dilution of the scientific poetics, because that means the other sections—most of the book—require science in order not to speak directly about emotions, and that, I think, is not Bök's purpose.

4. Self-imposed rules

The fundamental issue in all these points (1, 2, 3) is the role played by self-imposed rules: the master trope of crystallography, and the many smaller rules that govern how individual concepts and people are articulated as poetry. My concern here is the irregular application of those rules, and the kinds of occasions and contexts where Bök permits himself to bend or suspend the rules.

As in "Eunoia," the rule-bound construction of the book is continuously undermined by clearly aesthetic choices, freely made, which are themselves almost always the result of specific late-romantic and modernist allegiances. Sometimes Bök sounds like Celan ("Bleeding away / ages of images," p. 30), sometimes Bachelard ("A crystal is the flashpoint of a dream intense / enough to purge the eye of its infection, sight," p. 37), sometimes A.R. Ammons or his admirer the chemist Roald Hoffmann ("A word (like love) has a high refractive index," p. 37). Much of this material is late romantic, including typical romantic natural science interests like abyssal creatures and invertebrates ("lammelibranchs, coelenterates. / the lost animalculae from alien seas" (p. 47). The specter of Escher returns whenever the rules appear to be constructed by the author in order to articulate his own repetition compulsions: "any path that you take / breaks from its route / in the way that a root / word, when said, gets / tangled in its ganglia" (p. 44). This is rum poetry, driven by a nearly autistic sort of compulsion, much like the long lists of supposedly similar things in Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa." All these non-rule-bound emulations and aesthetic choices distract from the book's rule-bound, self-proclaimed metaphoric purpose. As in "Eunoia," I wish he had either presented these as also rule-bound ("I choose Celan because he is the poet of the crystal fragment," etc.) or purged them from the text in favor of echoes and allusions that remain illegible.

[Christopher Murtagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that I am not quite intelligent enough to understand this book on two different axis.

My knowledge of scientific terminology and just generally how crystals work, is not up to snuff. I wonder if crystal scientists read this and slap their thighs, beaming, saying "it's funny because it's true," or maybe "Finally, someone gets it. Finally, someone's writing about the important subjects."

Within this book there are lines like "arteriosclerotic veins of pyrite," or "alembic of silhouettes bezels oblique optics berylloid observatory." Prompting in me an, Umm, that sounds good, no idea what it means.

Mixed with the science, is the tradition of experimental poetry, which also, I know very little about. So at times, for me, this was a little opaque, not exactly clear as crystal. (Sorry.)

It reminded me of a quote on the back of The Collected plays of Beckett, that said something like he is seeing what grows in the stoney rubbish. Or the Pythagorean edict "Walk in Unfrequented Paths." Focusing on the science of crystals resulted in one of the most unique books you will ever read. And incredibly, this almost emotionless, scientific subject is not dry at all.

There are lots of semi-parody scientific illustrations, treating language like crystals.

Word games like "properties of the crystalline are proper ties for the crystal line."

"Planes are mere plans for panels and panes."

Some are little puzzles. Others are just nice images:

"Sunlight turns a swimming pool into a melting kaleidoscope."

Bits of science??

"Viruses are crystals come to life when exposed to radiation."

There are sections on diamonds, snow, various types of crystal, fractals, mirrors, symmetry. There are even a few short prose pieces at the end that are reminiscent of Borges.

An incredibly inventive construction of a book. I very much enjoyed it. A collection of glimmering parts.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hell of a debut book, ending up somewhere between bpNichol's "Probable Systems" and Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (maybe even to the point of ripping both off on occasion) - at its best it's a terrifically playful work of speculative pseudo-science/history, spinning axioms, postulates and grand theories out of puns and rhymes (or is it rimes?), but oftentimes it can go so far in the theoretical/philosophical direction that it ends up feeling more pseudo-intellectual than anything else: the Lacan citation is certainly a little bit tongue-in-cheek (the last chapter of this - very funny! great jabs at Lewis Carroll!), but are the musings on neoplatonic forms? How seriously are we supposed to take the poetics, which vacillate from phenomenally striking to eye-rollingly dull on an almost line-by-line basis? Does it really matter if the poetry is consistently good or if Bök believes in the reasoning abilities of the reader (so many conclusions it either draws or pretends to draw are spelled out explicitly and repeatedly, when a stronger book would allow its audience to reach them themselves) when it can be so fun to wrestle with and read through, when the typesetting is so singular? I believe Bök has a background in sound poetry, and I think it would be rewarding to hear him read from this: so many of these poems seem governed by invisible "lattices" of constraints (like crystal formation, you see? YOU SEE???) that I'm sure are crystal-clear (lol) in his head but don't quite end up visible on the page - perhaps they'd be audible coming out of his mouth?

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many concrete/visual poems, some of which are incredibly well-executed, for instance the second "crystals" poem where he only uses the letters in the word "crystals" in a form like falling rain. Even in the more traditional poetry, it's clear that the line lengths (not number of syllables or words, but the literal length, number of characters) are very deliberately chosen. However, there's only so much depth to these gambits, they come nowhere close to affective poetry. The word lattice written in four rows with no line height so the letters intersect looks cool and I will never need to see it again. The end explains this is a pataphysical endeavor, reading poetry through geology or vice versa or something, but it lacks all the humor of French pataphysics. The book's vocabulary is stupendous, so diverse, lovely use of scientific terms in poetry. One set of stanzas includes every cool castle word (crenellation, machicolation). Fun. I don't know if someone with a more scientific background would get more out of this, but it's certainly interesting.

[Milo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Writing represents the superficial damage endured by one / surface when inflicting damage upon the surface of another." (p.124)

Crystallography turns science, language, and space on their heads to form striking metaphors and statements of truth. Bök illustrakes—through poetry, prose, and diagrams—how crystallography is 'lucid writing' and how writing is science is art. Bök's paradigm of crystal language is not only convincing but beautiful, in the way snowflakes are beautiful. Crystallography is a book to be studied, in every meaning of the word.

[Owen Summerscales · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I have read in 2025 and my most fortuitous discovery in a long time. An outstanding, incredibly creative dive into the intersection between the science of crystals and poetry. As a scientist and crystallographer, I was very impressed with the scientific accuracy of this book, which surprised me greatly—and I even learned a few things, it's a real deep dive. The poetry is breathtaking, Bök is a serious poet. To put the icing on the cake, he even gets Borgesian at the end. Incredible, go and read this book!!!

[Deepak · Rating 5 out of 5]

So delightful and brilliant. I thought the constraints and conceit of it would dull the lustre somewhat but it really sparkles when you dive in. Lovely humor and emotion in equal measure in this excellent collection of poetry.

[Jes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a heavily researched, technically impressive book that just didn't resonate with me as much as some of Bök's other work. The visual poetry elements were fun and I learned some interesting things, but found myself skimming much more than I wanted to.

[Val · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for class and I hated it. Honestly don’t know if I’m reading another book than the people rating this 5 stars across the board but I feel like I’m being gaslit because I couldn’t even finish this all the way through.

[MJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beats the shit out of Kenneth Goldsmith in my opinion.

[Heitor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite parts: ‘DIAMONDS’ and ‘ENANTIOMORPHOSIS’

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a masterpiece. You either get it or you don't.

And that's the thing about Bök's poetry: it's always a masterpiece. And you either get it or you don't. . . .

[Polly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breath taking

[Aileen Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

The amount of words I had to look up is crazy

[nikki levinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book. It provided me with a very interesting and new way to look at not only the structure of the earth and it’s crystals, but also language and how we use it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the most unique books I've ever read. While I can't say I understood every poem, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I loved the author's ability to find the intersection between poetry and crystallography, and his incorporation of visual elements throughout the text. I've never read a book quite like this one and I wish there was more.

[Vogisland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Occasionally the voice or the tone of the experiments in this book struck me as cloying or "dated" in some way. Regardless I loved and will definitely reread this, 10/10, wish there were more.

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

We all love Bok because Bok plays games,
pulls strings and plays fey when prompted.
Coy is Bok's waylay. When I say coy or fey
I mean strange and playful, with strict structures'
effects of French stricture and Oulip scripture,
script writ gay and made great, but unfortunately
affected by having nothing to say.

I used to write stuff like this, and to some extent still do, however, there's a reason why I don't write like that anymore, or rather feel guilty when I do. Bok is the extreme, pro-level terminus of that style, of a logorrhea that is fun for a while but ultimately just sits and spins in its own onanic spiral, or tends to. That's sort of the problem with language-driven stuff. Look what this tool can do, ok now let's do something with it. Bok's stuff is sort of a show room for the English language. Lots of shiny things shown off and waxed and maybe there's even a nifty demonstration but nobody from the audience is allowed to climb into the driver's seat and feel how one of these things actually feels on the road. That's a shit metaphor but you know what I mean.
By no means should Bok stop, because I think he's doing something someone should do, and it's a lot of fun, and it's something that takes a certain type of genius, as well as a good thesaurus and mineralogist's handbook and a nice leather-bound volume of "Amusing Tangents In The History of Mathematics", and lots of fun theories on myths and mirrors and &c.&c.&c.

[Jessica Bebenek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this after having *experienced* Eunoia and, for me, it was a much appreciated step back in time with Bok. I love his work in conceptualism, but I often find that it strays too far on the side of concept and with not enough of a focus on final product for my taste.

Crystallography was perfect for me. I loved the blend of science and poetry, the overall conceit of the gems/words comparison, the experimentation with form, from concrete to lyric--even including a translucent sheet of overlay.

Not your typical poetry book. Loved it.

(Note: I read the 2011 Coach House second edition, which I understand is typeset/printed differently than the first. You have been warned!)

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

wowwww... here's a book that blew my hair back, even if I was hopelessly outwitted for large stretches. bök leads us through a mirror-chamber of snowflakes and blades, right up to the edge of madness, and then touchingly steps back. it feels like your efforts to comprehend an individual fragment of this text sharpens that fragment, and when you do finally understand it, it cuts you. definitely compels multiple readings for the things you didn't stop to sharpen on the first visit. at the moment I feel sufficiently sliced.

[SR · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really beautifully designed book. The contents have a lot of wonderfully expressed thoughts on language, materials, words, organization, civilization - not to mention gemstones. As a materials scientist I was a bit miffed at some of the fluffed/flawed technical terminology - glass isn't a slow liquid! it just isn't! stop! - but these were infrequent. Really interested in more of the author's work.