Antonin Artaud was a poet who assumed all the dimensions and consequences that word implies. His body, his mental life and his work were the same. They came together in the primordial, burning, dangerous, original magma from which ancient human beings drank their stories, incorporated their myths, spoke with their gods, healed themselves, decided their destiny, became others, birds, mountains, roots, fruits and where art did not exist, but was simply the highest dimension, the most intense, of what we call life. There, at that point, is where Artaud built his body and his work.

The Selected Works, published in two volumes, bring together, for the first time in Spanish, his essential writings, his correspondence and his drawings. The reader will find here his entire literary career: from his first surrealist poems to the dazzling texts at the end of his life; his cinematographic and theatrical experiences; his trips to the ancient myths of Mexico and Ireland; the years in psychiatric hospitals; his drawings; His final writing, furious and radiant in mystery.

Antonin Artaud, whom psychiatrists called schizophrenic, fought tirelessly against the split between things and signs, between art and life. He was not mentally ill. He was a poet who opened the way for us, risking his own life, towards a possible redemption, a possible cure for the ills of the West. And he found that cure in a physical place and in a mental territory: in the native peoples of Mexico. The reader has in his hands not a book, but a body-work, a map, a North Star that will lead him towards the future time in which myths and gods will be among us again.