Published on the occasion of the New Museum’s 2010 retrospective of the work of the multifaceted and hugely influential artist Brion Gysin, Alarme consists of the 1977 calligraphic poem of the same name which was conceived as an artist’s book but never received publication during Gysin’s lifetime. Presented as a square-format series of one-sided pages, Alarme defies easy categorization. Although it consists of words, gridded and repeated to suggest a series of mantras, the words have a tendency to dissolve into visual patterns and pure gestural marks. As Gladys Fabre writes in the book’s introductory essay, “Alarme is an attempt to transcend death. By expelling all signs of identity and by impelling the words unrelentingly into the ink, the artist manages to extinguish his ego, reaching the path that leads to detachment, to ecstasy.”