I first encountered Michaux’s astonishing work in Stroke By Stroke, a physically and conceptually beautiful little book . . . Reading Stroke By Stroke, I felt invited to travel “toward greater ungraspability”—and in our uncertain times, Michaux’s ease with that is deeply reassuring.

Henri Michaux is 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.

Michaux travels via his languages: lines, words, colors, silences, rhythms. And he does not hesitate to break the back of a word...In order to arrive: where? At that nowhere that is here, there, and everywhere.

Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of stange things.

Michaux is the poet laureate of our insomnia.