The Xenotext: Book 2 is the culminating second half of Christian Bök’s 25-year Xenotext project. It has received less media attention than Book 1, but I can assure those who enjoyed the first volume they will not be disappointed in the second. For those unfamiliar with Bök’s work I would say: do not be intimidated by the scientific backstory or the charts and diagrams. Don’t worry that you haven’t read Book 1. Listen for the epic music, the otherworldly imagery, and the poignant—more so for being heavily constrained—human sentiments.

According to the “Fata Explicata” endnotes “Book 1… is ‘Orphean’: it looks ‘aback’ in time… whereas Book 2 of The Xenotext is ‘Eurydicean’: it looks ahead in time, addressing the global concerns of our prophesied extinction.” But Bök sees cataclysm in both directions, and the relation between the two books—much like that between the two slender genetically encoded poems at the heart of the project—is one of deliberate symmetry, though with a classically gendered thematic. The dedication for both volumes is “for the maiden in her dark, pale meadow.”

When I reviewed The Xenotext: Book 1 for Arc back in 2016, I complained that for all the fuss around the mutually encoded poems inserted into bacterial DNA, the volume did not actually publish them. Book 2 does finally reproduce the text of “Orpheus” and “Eurydice” and gives them a central presence.

The penultimate section is a cluster of works surrounding the Xenotext itself. (Bök uses the singular to denote the pair.) Because of his enormous preparatory efforts in cryptography, genetics, and proteomics—the study of protein formation—Bök is perhaps over-invested in asserting the beauty and significance of his slim diptych. The Xenotext, after all, is his message in a living bottle, sent into the potentially very distant future.

“The Xenotext” section includes: poems in highly restrictive forms, cryptological and genetic diagrams, microphotography of the actual microbes showing their pinkish glow (a genetic marker attached to the encoded poem to verify its presence and conveniently denote Eurydice’s “blush”), silkscreen visualizations by Eveline Kolijn, blocks of explanatory prose, and the author’s own defence of the Xenotext’s significance.

The best of the poetry in this volume, though, is not in the Xenotext itself, but elsewhere, for example in the villanelle entitled “The Dark, Pale Meadow,” with its refrain:

In Hell,
we learn to wield
no weapon
but the lyre.

In 2016 I hoped a future Book 2 might contain a closer retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice as tragedy. Bök’s governing purpose, after all, is to “immortalize the Greek story… preserving the gist of this tale by means of a ‘book’ that can outlast the extinction of our species.” We are given plenty on the mechanics and thematics of preservation and of extinction, but what of ‘the gist’? Is it as simple as Bök’s most compressed description: “a motif of lost love”?

Apparently so, as the tragic aspect—the hubris of Orpheus—has been appropriated by the author in his quest to write and genetically encode the Xenotext poem(s). Bök becomes Orpheus, but instead of failing, he succeeds. This is why the most intriguing poems in the book are those that grant the reader a glimpse of Bök’s mortal, even fallible side. The closest to the classical narrative we get is in the concluding lines of “A Nocturne for Eurydice,” an unusually—for Christian Bök—personal poem set in tropical Australia:

Let me keep my faith aloft, like a flame
my firm gaze unreturning to this rift
behind us at the blind spot of my loss.

Let me promise bravely to uphold you,
though we falter at the threshold when we cross.