Shifting the Silence

"When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? writes the 95-year-old polymath Etel Adnan in her new book, Shifting the Silence, which contemplates death and aging. Of course, nothing. But thats no answer. The books publication this fall coincides with her new show, Seasons."The New York Times "The artists brightly tranquil new show at Galerie Lelong coincides with the publication of Adnans Shifting the Silence, a quietly shattering meditation on death, which interweaves memoir with observations both geopolitical and galactic. (The books subjects include the war in Syria, the California wildfires, and missions to Mars.) Adnans visual lexicon bears a rich, if elliptical, relationship to her writing; her new, pandemic-inspired painting subject is planets. A suite of vertical compositions in a candy-colored palette represents them as spheres hanging low in the sky, extraterrestrial complements to her abstract landscapes."The New Yorker "Life is revisited again and again in these pages; old friends are named, places from Mount Shasta to Paris are explored, and final hopes are offered ('I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons'). Each paragraph in these prose poems pushes against the idea that there is 'no resolution to somebodys final absence.'This memorable collection continues Adnans legacy as a poet of the personal, political, and cosmic."Publishers Weekly "'When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? Of course, nothing.' Adnans prose-poetic rumination on death would strike a chord at any time, but it feels especially apt in this moment of protracted grief. Peppered with questions'There are so many islands I dreamed of visiting, where have they gone?'Adnans lamentations are recursive and soothing. To live is to die, and the poets can ease the passage."The Millions "Etel Adnan dispenses down-to-earth wisdom in her poetic work Shifting the Silence, bringing readers along as she recounts her global travels and lessons learned. We are lucky to glimpse her 95 years of life condensed into these pages, and thumb through her thoughts on the passage of life. Hailed as a meditation or rumination on the inevitability of dying, this work has a blunt calmness that makes conversation about death seem like a light-hearted talk over tea rather than a morbid whispering."Vagabond City "Days end, and planetary orbits will eventually decay. Adnan embraces the chaos and abstraction of life before death, an acceptance of the limits of her consciousnesswhat has been, what will be again in a different shape, and will never be."DIAGRAM "Adnan takes us from our horizons to herswhich, through that 'you,' become oursand we are an active witness. The sun blends as the horizon blurs eyes send water down the screen of the sky to smudge that descent. Crying is a horizon. The sun ducks and we stare at it to burn a blur through. The blur is movement, not a void. To be shocked into silence isnt to be stopped."The Poetry Project Newsletter "As readers we tend towards needing to lose ourselves amid the busy scramble of our day-to-day lives. At times we seek to escape our own expectations and wish quite naturally to keep ourselves preoccupied by something other than our own concerns. Adnan identifies this as a quite natural tendency to which we all succumb: We have ways to distract ourselves from our destinies. I dont know how, we just play it by instinct. We manage to take our attention away, into outer space, into a history book, into our own imaginations, or just a post-card, but we do, we go. (Adnan 66) So urgent is this need to go and not confront the present and/or future moment of our destinies that we urge ourselves in the

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 19581972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (19541962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (19591975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, an American poet. In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapersfirst for Al Safa, then for LOrient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of Frances highest cultural honors: lOrdre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.