Michael Betancourt explains his work with asemic poetry like this: "I once had an experience while driving behind a truck with a big logo printed on the back -- large, gothic captitals -- that simply refused to resolve into coherent lettering for me. There were letters there and I could recognize that the curves and uprights were text, but it refused to be coherent as lettering. Making typoetry is my attempt to explore that experience, to modulate the recognition of lettering without the need to always or consistently produce letters, words, or lexical statements."

“CMYK compiles a series of glyphs as if from an impossible world, where reading moves from left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down, down-to-up, in-to-out, and vice-verse. Patterns and colour gradations combine to create movement effects that pull reading into even more impossible orientations, strange relations, and uncanny exuberance. What are they saying, you may ask, and how are they saying it? Instead of an answer, you merely fall into this delightful world where the feeling of a deeper language pulses on each page.” — Gregory Betts

"... a progression of animated neon-light line configurations emerge from black space like two-dimensional sculptures, or fanciful mechanicals, or diagrams for carnival rides, or pinball tracking schematics.... Look closely to discover the scaffoldings of alphabet letters bent and twisted to accommodate all the action." —Rosaire Appel