Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions; Etel Adnan at Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München and Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

It gathers artworks from all periods of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre and in a wide range of media. Side by side with her small-format abstract paintings, whose intensity of colour lends them an almost mystical quality, her monumental tapestries, delicate works on paper, leporellos, and experiments on film shed light on her specific engagement with questions of colour and form and with the cosmic dimension of time, space, and the spiritual.

One of the most notable members of the New York School and its most prominent woman, Barbara Guest is the author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction. The most recent to appear is The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan Poetry). Other major works include The Red Gaze (Wesleyan Poetry), Forces of Imagination (Kelsey Street Press), Miniatures and Other Poems (Wesleyan Poetry), and Symbiosis (Kelsey Street Press). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, visual artist, and essayist. Her rich body of work documents an unblinking witness to beauty in nature, human beings and art; to cruelty, especially as enacted in the mindless violence of war; and to the power of love and human perseverance. In Premonition the voice is wise and paradoxical, opening with the observation, “There’s always a conductive thread through space for untenable positions.” Sentences are set apart in aphoristic cuts never wholly separate from this “conductive thread,” and always shaped by the gem-like compressions of poetry. Premonition is a short book that refuses finality in a world of contingencies and human unpredictability.

“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.”