The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing: April 2023

The latest book from Post-Asemic Press is Typo Poem by Michael Betancourt. PAP is pleased to release this book because it is an exciting and potent blend of graphic design and asemic writing with a meticulous display of spirit and artistry.

Michael Betancourt’s Typo Poem is an extended meditation on the glitches of language, where letters and words collapse back into their constituent parts, becoming asemic. These poems are made from typography and the failings that always lurk just beneath the surface. It offers an ongoing provocation for its readers, one which rewards re-viewing, re-readings, and returns because on each engagement, what is and is not in the pages seems to change, despite being printed. The excitement this work offers expands over time as its materials become more familiar and stranger makes it a collection worth the time it demands.

Betancourt’s typoems are reminiscent of many ideas in asemic language, Wildstyle, Cubism. Each and every work is layered and architectural warm, and also filled with humanitarian fragmentation that allows the imagination to move through these spaces.
— José Parlá, artist

Betancourt’s elegant asemic compositions, spatially ambiguous and graphically complex, are deceptively lucid at first glance. But these works hover in an indeterminate space, as if waiting to be collapsed through the perception of the viewer into an either/or resolution of il/legibility. Instead, the poems refuse to become fixed and thus sustain an ongoing provocation.
— Johanna Drucker, writer, artist, and scholar