The Xenotext

The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia.

Christian Bk, in Book 1 of The Xenotext, outlined his plan to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text durable enough to outlive any apocalypse, surviving until the death of the Sun itself. After more than two decades of effort, Bk has, at last, succeeded at this incredible experiment, and Book 2 of The Xenotext situates his enterprise within the deep time of the cosmos.

Bk rehearses some of the techniques likely to be used in the future to preserve the cultural heritage of our civilisation against a potential planetary disaster (be it thermonuclear warfare or astrophysical barrage); moreover, Bk 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.