Night
Author: Etel Adnan
Publisher: Nightboat (2016)
Etel Adnan’s evocative new book places night at its center to unearth memories held in the body, the spirit and the landscape. This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.
"Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan’s Night is in equal measure a series of meditations on intersubjectivity and spirituality, and a dialogue between prose poetry and short verse. But it’s a contrast to the usual songs of the self, which emphasize intensity of feeling and an essence of the person that exists beyond the constraints of language. Night shows that language itself is more supple than reductive ideas of feeling or essence, which either instrumentalize language or try to surpass it."
–Hyperallergic
"A meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s “Book of Hours” and the verses of Sufi mysticism, Night is an intricate thread of reflections on pain and beauty.”
–The New York Times
"There are few lives that have charted the dislocations, tectonic shifts, passions, and innumerable heartbreaks of the modern Arab world more thoroughly than Etel Adnan… She is a writer of searing, sometimes surrealist heights."
–Artforum