The Xenotext: Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015)

Overview

The Xenotext: Book 1 is an “infernal grimoire” that introduces readers to the conceptual groundwork for a scientific experiment, in which the poet creates an example of “living poetry,” encoding a text into the genome of a deathless bacterium – one capable of outliving every apocalypse, enduring till the Sun itself expires. The book offers a primer in genetics, even as it revisits the pastoral heritage of poetry, updating the orphic idylls of Virgil for a new age of mythic danger – be it in the beauty of artful biogenesis, if not in the terror of global extinction.

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