“Throughout the seven sections that are woven into a unified whole, Adnan displays a remarkable sensibility for the precise details that fuse the landscapes of individual and social nightmares. Through an ingenious synthesis of the best elements of the surrealist, cut-up and Language schools of writing, Adnan has attained a unique poetic voice.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

Illustrated with etchings by Russell Chatham.

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

A new volume of aphoristic prose and philosophical poetry from Etel Adnan, whose work The New York Times recently described as the “meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism.” She writes: “Reality is messianic / apocalyptic / my soul is my terror.”

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 indispensable book by an indispensable writer”—Morgan Gibson.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. A classic of war literature, it won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege.

“A series of meditations following the sun, Seasons arrives in mesmerizing waves of observation and reflection. The blue depths of Adnan’s inquiry—into the nature of Being, Time, knowledge itself—crest moment upon moment of quiet revelation, as the passions of history, myth, today, and yesterday rage and subside beneath her watchful eye. ‘To think is not to contemplate, it’s to witness.’ So stanzas wash upon the page’s horizon, ever moving toward the mind’s encounters with the world. Intimate with ephemera, alert to what’s hidden, Seasons seeks the universe within and beyond the spirit’s changeable weather, finding everywhere its center.”—Megan Pruiett