Etel Adnan (b.1925) is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist and visual artist. This will be the first book to present a full account of Adnan's fascinating life and work, using the drama of her biography, the complexity of her identity, and the cosmopolitan nature of her experience to illuminate the many layers and dimensions of her paintings and their progress over several crucial decades. Adnan came relatively late to painting - her first images were created in the mid-1960s in response to the Californian landscape. Her vocabulary of lines, shapes and colours has changed little since then, and yet there are huge variations in mood, texture, composition and material. Similarly, there is a balance between understanding her paintings as pure abstractions, emulating the shape of thought, and seeing them for the actual landscapes of the many places Adnan has loved, embraced and responded to. Tackling the complexities of her subject with skill and insight, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie unpacks Adnan's multi-layered career to capture the full scope of her artistic endeavours and impressive achievements.

An evocative new book from one of our leading philosopher poets

As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, syntactic pleasures at once.

This collection of essays concentrates on Arab-American writer and artist Etel Adnan. Up until now, there has been no single volume dedicated to her work despite Adnan's increasing recognition and acclaim across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays fall into two sections. In the first, the essays respond to the range of vision and experience in Adnan's writing and art through analysis and appreciation. The second section focuses on responses to and interpretations of Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan's well known novel about the Lebanese war. As a whole, the writings in this work seek to provide a comprehensive look at Adnan's literary and artistic accomplishments through analysis and close readings that place her texts within wider literary contexts.

Poetry. "With this book of poems Etel Adnan establishes herself as a major poet who belongs beside internationally acclaimed poets like Transtromer, Bly, Neruda, Vallejo, and Pessoa." Eric Sellin"

Fiction. Etel Adnan's novel "PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer" -Morgan Gibson.

A heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing deathShifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan's window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.

Literary Nonfiction. JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS is an essay on Nature, Art, and the relationship between them. Highly original in both content and literary structure, it provides a new outlook on the importance of Nature as an element of thinking; one of the major works on the "spirit of place" in contemporary literature. This book is illustrated with 17 drawings by the author. "An enlightening journey for those who love the mountain, and for those who love Etel Adnan." Wendell Berry"

Translated from the French and with drawings by the author.