Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world's oldest living language. Poet Gustaf Sobin's luminous English version beautifully captures the astounding and strange French original. For Michaux, the Chinese culture ranked as the world's richest, a culture grounded in its written language, which bound China together through three millennia and across its enormous territories. Ideograms in China presents an oblique history of that culture through the changing variety and beauty of the ideograms: Michaux looks into a dozen scripts--from ancient bronze vessels bearing ku-wen script to running script to standard k'ai-shu characters--and the poem carries the rhythms of someone discovering the soul of a civilization in its impression of ink on paper.

"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In "Miserable Miracle," the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.
Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

This selection is from L'Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror--where Chaplin meets Kafka--a world of pure and rare invention.

"Thousand Times Broken" collects three never-before-translated texts by Henri Michaux. Composed between 1956 and 1959, during Michaux's mescaline experiments, the texts include "400 Men on the Cross," a contemplation of his loss of Catholic faith; "Peace in the Breaking," a poem written under the influence of mescaline; and "Watchtowers on Targets," a singular, automatic collaboration with surrealist painter Roberto Matta.
"To record the ineffable is Michaux's paradoxical project in these stunning works from the mid- to late-50s. Central to his oeuvre, to his life-long effort to come to terms with faith, they radiate an uncommon immediacy and conviction. Conoley's excellent selection--combining drawings, asemic writings, poetry, and prose commentary--offers the variety of perspectives required to appreciate the true scope of his project, and her translation keeps the writing--with all its eclectic vocabulary and dressage pacing--vibrantly alive. This is an invaluable addition to Michaux's works in English, filling an important gap with a vivid, vibrant linguistic performance." -- Cole Swensen
"The remarkable and singular Michaux: poet, visual artist, travel writer, novelist, "all intimately related," as Octavio Paz once noted. In his quest for the inexpressible, Michaux represents the ultimate paradox, at once visionary mystic and rationalist, as he seeks to chart the journey without end. Gillian Conoley's skilled and vital translations, as well as her deeply illuminating commentaries on the three extraordinary volumes collected here, are indeed a revelation and a gift." -- Michael Palmer
"In Gillian Conoley's committed, devoted translation, with her thoughtful introduction, appear three visionary works from Henri Michaux. Michaux's turbulent but nuanced struggle with the cosmic defamiliarization of verbal and visual art registers risk wherein alphabetical signs become marks or figures, and figures become signs, become words. Dynamic, provocative relationships seek and meet exquisite encounters, a little black angel, the secret of life, 'this tree with fine branches.' Evolving thematic concerns such as body, spirit, faith and fate sing with an electric charge." -- Norma Cole
"Henri Michaux was a poet's poet and also a poet's artist, yet he was also, as John Ashbery so beautifully put it, "hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience -- the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living." In these three remarkable works from the late fifties, in which the activity of inscription inhabits the abstract mark as well as the signifying word, Michaux "perceived what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects if at all." Now, through Gillian Conoley's impassioned translation, Anglophone readers can perceive it too." -- Barry Schwabsky, poet and critic for "The Nation"

One of the most influential French writers and visual artists of the twentieth century, Henri Michaux was known for his explorations of perception and consciousness.

Gillian Conoley is the author of seven books of poetry and edits the long-running journal "Volt."

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "genius," and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "is without equal in the literature of our time." This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

Poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) was one of the most original and influential figures of twentieth century French poetry, hailed by Allen Ginsberg as 'master' and 'genius' and by Borges as 'without equal in the literature of our time'. In his vividly strange narratives Michaux creates a dream-like, mercurial world of wry invention unlike any other, idiosyncratic, resistant and philosophical. Often dramatic and incantatory in his poetics, he was also an extremely private person, shunning publicity, writing as he put it for all those 'suffering from their imaginations.' In Storms under the Skin Jane Draycott translates poems and prose-poems from Michaux's volumes 1927-54, including extracts from his best-loved creations Plume and the haunting realm of Les Emanglons, alongside poems written on the eve of war in Europe and during the Occupation.

Hacia 1935 conoci en Buenos Aires a Henri Michaux. Lo recuerdo como un hombre sereno y sonriente, muy lucido, de buena y no efusiva conversacion y facilmente ironico. No profesaba ninguna de las supersticiones de aquella fecha (Paris, los conventiculos literarios y el culto, entonces de rigor, de Pablo Picasso). A lo largo de su vida ejercio dos artes: la pintura y las letras. Como Aldous Huxley, exploro los alucinogenos y penetro en regiones de pesadilla que inspirarian su pincel y su pluma." Jorge Luis Borges

Parallel French/English texts. Michaux is one of the notable travellers of modern French poetry; not only to the Amazon and the Far East, but into the strange hinterland of his own inner space. Fired by the same explorer's appetite, he has delved into the realm of mescaline and other drugs, and his wartime poetry, part of a private 'resistance' movement of extraordinary density and energy, has advertised his view of the poetic act as a form of exorcism.