8 Quotes by Christian Bök

Scots from hogtowns or cowtowns work from cockcrow to moondown -- to chop down woodlots, to plow down cornrows.

The poem shows you that, as you write it, the form of it, if not the flow of it, must rule you; otherwise, what you feel in it, will fail you.

Slick pimps, bribing civic kingpins, distill gin in stills, spiking drinks with illicit pills which might bring bliss.

Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal - a gala ball that has what pagan charm small galas lack. Hassan claps, and (tah-dah) an Arab lass at a swank spa can draw a man's bath and wash a man's back, as Arab lads fawn and hang, athwart an altar, amaranth garlands as fragrant as attar - a balm that calms all angst. A dwarf can flap a palm branch that fans a fat maharajah.

Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash - a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank. Hassan acts fast, ransacks cashbags at a mad dash, and grabs what bank drafts a bank branch at Casablanca can cash: marks, rands and bahts. Hassan asks that an adman draft a want ad that can hawk what canvas art Hassan has (a Cranach, a Cassatt and a Chagall).

Pilgrims, digging in shifts, dig till midnight in mining pits, chipping flint with picks, drilling schist with drills, striking it rich mining zinc. Irish firms, hiring micks whilst firing Brits, bring in smiths with mining skills: kilnwrights grilling brick in brickkilns, millwrights grinding grist in gristmills. Irish tinsmiths, fiddling with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin whirring drillbits.

Plasma blasts scald asphalt; napalm blasts parch macadam (glass shards act as haphazard abradants that sandblast all landwrack)...A mad labman at a lab crafts an anthrax gas that can waft past all walls at a stalag and harm war camps that lack standard gas masks.

The creeks wend between beech trees, then end where freshets feed the meres (there, the speckled perch teem; there, the freckled newts rest). The leverets, then the shrews, chew the nettles. The dew bedews the ferns.