Sea and Fog

Born in 1925 in Beirut, ETEL ADNAN has written more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A two-volume collection, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, was published in 2014. She is a recipient of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, the California Book Award, a Lambda Book Award, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.

“This is the vision of an artist who has seen and thought much, and whose concern for the universe of which she counts herself a citizen runs deep . . . Sea and Fog concerns itself with universal forces, refusing to shy away from the most tragic repeating cycles of human nature: departure, death, war, and love. Hope, in its conventional form, may not be present in these pages, but deep understanding that may lead us there—that, perhaps, we may read into the endless motion of Adnan’s fog-fringed sea.”—Lambda Literary Review“Etel Adnan sharpens the starkness of the world of matter and anti-matter. These texts are psalms that stretch from the sublime to the violent, journey from Yosemite Valley to a soldier’s jeep in the desert, and gather from Dostoevsky to Scalapino. A history, a gospel, a prayer book, it dwells in the divine.”—Elmaz Abinader