He defines his work as "ambient" literature, which draws on and samples source material from the internet and popular culture to address issues involving plagiarism, copyright, boredom, distracted modes of reading, paratext, and technology.
He received M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City; his dissertation, completed in 1995, was titled "Garbage, Truth, and the Recycling of Modern Life.
A commentary by Katherine Elaine Sanders described the style by saying, "Lin leads his audiences in exploring the temporary ephemera that fills our daily interactions: emails, Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, blogs, movies, magazines, and advertisements, indexes, photographs, and recipes.
"[12] The first published work by Lin was Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe in 1996, a "meditation backwards", where he invented new poetry structures through the manipulation of the mechanics of language.
In 2010, Lin published 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, in which he continued his use of inventive poetry structures, this time in the style of "a field guide to the arts.
[18] In the project HEATH (Plagiarism/Outsource), Lin presented a collection of language and graphics compiled from a variety of online sources, ranging from advertisements to Facebook to scholarly articles.
[20] In 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking, Lin wrote prose poems that are disrupted by themselves, alluding to the idea of art being "relaxingly meaningless."
The seven sections of the book each address a different art form, including photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, theory, and film, using both text and photographs.