Eunoia - Softcover

Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. "A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes"--Harry Matthews. "Eunoia" is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means "beautiful thinking." EUNOIA is a universal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo--the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints--the text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express uncanny thought. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this work of literature is "an exemplary monument for 21st-century poetry"--Charles Bernstein.