Creatures, Honeybees

Photograph by John Flannery

From Jacket2:

The book fits somewhere in the early twenty-first century between J. Craig Venter’s genome cowboying and GMO redemption rhetoric and Donna Haraway’s accusatory “fetishism of the gene,” the feminist eco-technoscience-inspired rejection of masculinized selfish genes and synthetic genome rescue operations in favor of a decentered, pluralized, and environmentally embedded sense of coming to know what genotypes and phenotypes can do.

In a section titled “The Nucleobases,” for example, Bök supplies a visual of each nucleotide and crafts a short poem on tightly restricted terms: only nine-letter words beginning with the first letter of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, or hydrogen in proportion to the nucleobase’s chemical formula, and including some content that rhapsodizes bees (the fate of bees is a thread that runs throughout Book 1). Here is “Adenine (C₅H₅N₅)”:

nurturant
creatures, honeybees
nursemaid
collected
chemicals,
cocooning nectarous honeydews — heartsome
narcotics,
cunningly harvested,
numbingly hypnoidal (87)

Reading Bök’s many DNA poems, we realize that all our bodies are made from highly restricted vocabularies. Bök wrote in the time of the first generation to witness the great bee die-off, when the chemical genius of bees was undone by other chemical geniuses who decided to spread insecticidal neonicotinoids everywhere. This was a time when one could openly question whether skill at synthetic genetic modification or care for a biodiverse world stood as the highest mark of intelligence.

“On reading Christian Bök’s ‘The Xenotext: Book 1’ ten thousand years later”, Joshua Schuster, Jacket2