The Xenotext: Book 2

by Christian Bök

In The Book 1, Christian Bök outlined his plan to insert his poem, written as DNA, into a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text able to outlive every apocalypse, enduring till the Sun itself expires. Now that the experiment has finally succeeded, Book 2 of The Xenotext situates that poem within the deep time of the cosmos.

Our civilization has only very limited methods for preserving its cultural heritage against a potential planetary disaster (be it thermonuclear warfare or astrophysical barrage); however, this experiment rehearses some of the techniques likely to be used in the future to preserve our archives against such annihilation.

Writing in his signature poetics, 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.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

Published June 3, 2025

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

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

Christian Bök is a poet who is interested in science and in extreme constraints. Perhaps his most famous work is Eunoia, Where he writes poems each using only a single vowel (together with any consonants), and using pretty much every word in the dictionary that fits that constraint.
For decades he's been working on an audacious, outrageous project called the Xenotext. He uses a cipher to encode a poem into DNA bases. These bases then generate an RNA strand, with a different cipher, which makes an entirely different poem. He then actually inserts these DNA into an extremophile called radiodurans, which preserves the poem in its DNA indefinitely. Also, it glows red when the poem is present. I'm saying all this from memory, so I may have gotten some of the details wrong. This book contains those poems, several other poems about the project, or about Covid-19, or other related topics. The theme of many of these are Greek myths about the underworld. One image that stuck with me brought to mind the fields of asphodel.
This is the third of his books I've bought new, so he is certainly my favorite living poet. As he says, when the critics say poetry is dead, the true poet makes his poem unkillable.

Here are the xenotext poems themselves. You can confirm that every "a" in the first poem is replaced by a "t" in the second poem, and so forth. My one complaint is that he says there were many other constraints caused by the biology of DNA replication, but doesn't go into what they are anywhere.

1. Orpheus
any style of life
is prim
oh stay
my lyre
with wily ploys
moan the riff
the riff
of any tune aloud
moan now my fate
in fate
we rely
my myth
now is the word
the word of life

2. Eurydicе
the faery is rosy
of glow
in fate
we rely
moan more grief
with any loss
any loss
is the achy trick
with him we stay
oh stay
my lyre
we wean
him of any milk
any milk is rosy

I was interested in the general problem of poems that are ciphers of each other. I found this website where they have done some work with figuring out the best ciphers to try to write poetry with: https://www.langlearnlab.cs.uvic.ca/b...

my own attempt at a cipher poem (using the cipher suggested at the previous link)
(abcdefjklnpqx
ightomuvrswzy)

-------
The Pirates

A mast I loot. He nabs food, oils,
in wool a garrot
am a rot, a maggot, a vat.

I rail as fast wild wind I rip, rend, fix a mast
blow, pelt, hissed coil, his roils rain, rigor.

A parrot I caw, a blast.
I rob a fast fort.
`Tis blob, dot, mass of Calif. gold.

His rod can go, a pin in cannon,
in a pistol.
At post near Lisbon
go I west.
Vast Briton sees `em net.
Feel near a reef, a port, sop ales.
I mix bros fees,
beet red blood if I bleed.
A bod fit in a bed I saw.

-------
The Wandering Lawyer

I find a reed, co-sign
meet, earn as peer.

I billed if I led, I fibbed, I kid
a liar in mind part past a law.

Lost, may I find,
grep word, cannot hear, can learn, lias, label.

I willed a hip, I grind a leg,
I mind meld Dan, Greg, Ted, Finn, Em, Hiram, Bert
can let his be.

I was as hisses
as I wander.
I'd wend soil ranges:
be a pond,
kind glades,
noon of sod,
moor soil I loom.

I weld new iron
a fay glen moon.
Good lot.
Greet: "am a Groot."

I get mad as I got a nip.

[Dr. Devine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't like having to wait ten years for a new collection by Christian Bök. But I get it.

He simply doesn't miss, whether it's combing through dictionaries to find words with only one vowel in the word, or collaborating with scientists to create a living poem.

A co-worker of mine had him as a prof and said that he was insufferable and arrogant.

Honestly? He kinda can be. His work speaks for itself.

[Mo P]

(to-read) I am very hesitant to use the g-word, but then I read Peter Watts' recommendation of this book over at https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11511 and concluded that Bök is a genius, and that I have to check it out. To quote that post:

"... back in the early two-thousands Christian Bök... started work on the world’s first biologically-self-replicating poem: the *Xenotext Experiment*, which aspired to encode a poem into the genetic code of a bacterium. Not just a poem, either: a *dialog*. The DNA encoding one half of that exchange (“Orpheus” by name) was designed to function both as text and as a functional gene. The protein it coded for functioned as the other half (“Eurydice”), a sort of call-and-response between the gene and its product. The protein was also designed to fluoresce red, which might seem a tad gratuitous until you realize that “Eurydice”’s half of the dialog contains the phrase “the faery is rosy/of glow”.

Phase One involved engineering Orpheus and Eurydice into the benign and ubiquitous E. coli, just to work out the bugs. Ultimately, though, the target microbe was Deinococcus radiodurans: also known as “Conan the Bacterium” on account of being one of the toughest microbial motherfuckers on the planet. ...

As things turned out, it had to await somewhat longer than expected. The project hinged upon molecular techniques that did not exist when the experiment began. Christian taught himself the relevant skills— genetics, proteomics, coding— and enlisted a team of scientists (not to mention a supercomputer or two) to invent them."

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading The Xenotext: Book 1 and this in a row is really great – every loose end is tied up. If book 1 looked back to the past, like Orpheus, book 2 can't but look ahead into the future, like Euridice. I even feel like I have a (temporary) understanding of the genetic processes involved, and the poems (and the proses especially) are so great. I'll come back to these two books, and the texts around them, for a long long time.

[Paul Guthrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an amazing book of experimental poems, including The Xenotext, a plan to encode a poem (well, two poems, as the one poem encodes another) inside the DNA of D. radiodurans, an extremophile. Others are about Covid-19, the Fermi Paradox, deep time, Fortean events. The poems often have very strict rules that guide them. The poem Orpheous and its pair, Eurydice, for example, are written such that the letters of the first poem act as ciphers for the letters of the second poem.

Incredibly audacious, vainglorious, and so, so interesting.

[Christina Marta · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening chapter, about the organism that cannot be killed, is terrifying and unsettling. I had hoped that the rest would be similar, but it became a book of poems. Very good ones, roundels I think they are called? I'm not well-versed enough in modern poetry to have an opinion worth listening to. But I do like pentameter wherever I see it.