Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, _Dictée_

I'M DRAWN TO the sheer bookness of this book -- that it wholly eludes being any kind of book (fiction, memoir, poetry, history) yet remains very definitely a book, something that even physically seems designed to inhabit book-space, book dimensions, to be book and nothing but book, to shed with a slight shake any other descriptors.

What else is there like this? Some of Susan Howe's books and some of Cole Swenson's share in Dictée's blurring of generic categories, in its use of graphic elements, in its integrity as a project that had to be a book, could only be a book, was bound (ha!) to be a book. Lisa Robertson, perhaps. Some artists, perhaps. Blake?

There need to be more books like this, and surely they will come, as digital media increasingly make distinguish what need not necessarily be a book from what can only be a book.

Mallarmé famously claimed that "tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre." Books like this make one think he must have been right.