‘Bibliomechanics’ is a book that consists of 27 Rubik’s cubes, stacked together into a block (3 × 3 × 3) so as to create a facsimile of the ‘writing-machine’ described by Jonathan Swift in ‘A Voyage to Laputa.’ Every facet of these cubes displays a white word printed in Futura on a black label so that, when properly stacked together, the Rubik’s cubes create 18 separate surfaces (6 exterior, 12 interior), each one of which becomes a page that displays a readable sentence (81 words long). Each sentence paraphrases a poetic theory about the ‘mechanization’ of literature. The reader can, of course, scramble each cube so as to create an alternative permutation, generating a new text from the lexicon of the old text. The work has appeared in the artshow POÈME SBJKT at Librairie Métamorphoses in Paris (25 May – 15 Jul 2023).

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Christian Bök is the author of ‘Eunoia,’ the bestselling winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize.