Thousand Times Broken

Thousand Times Broken brings together three extraordinary, previously untranslated books in which Henri Michaux's art and poetry merge in ways never seen before, composing a journey in which we----with the great visionary Michaux as our guide----are invited to hover between reading and looking, between the ineffable and the known, between body and spirit into a realm where it is possible to perceive "what one otherwise doesn't perceive, what one hardly suspects at all." Composed between 1956-1959, during Michaux's mescaline experiments, all three books engage a dynamic struggle between the mark and the word as Michaux searches for a medium up to the task of expressing the inexpressible. Included are Four Hundred Men on the Cross, a ghostly, enigmatic contemplation of Michaux's loss of faith, Peace in the Breaking, written under the influence of mescaline, its title poem of pure ascension sent flowing into the same spine-like furrows of Michaux's India ink drawings, and Watchtowers on