He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler.

The Village Voice said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself.

He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.

"[4] Edited by Darren Wershler and published by Coach House Books in 2001, Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and sold more than 20,000 copies.

The gene has so far worked properly in cultures of E. coli, but the intended symbiote is D. radiodurans ("the dire seed, immune to radiation") — an extremophile, able to thrive in very inhospitable environments, deadly to most life on Earth.

According to Bök from an interview in 2007, the final product will include: a poetic manual that showcases the text of the poem, followed by an artfully designed monograph about the experiment, including, for example, the chemical alphabet for the cipher, the genetic sequence for the poetry, the schematics for the protein, and even a photograph of the microbe, complete with other apparati, such as charts, graphs, images, and essays, all outlining our results.

[citation needed] In 2006, Christian Bök and his work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet, produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.