Surge

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.

"Surge, as the title suggests, is a book awash in movement: the movement of mind, of time and of memory. It presents an old poet at home, at night, roving through her recollections of dead or dying friends, landscapes passed through or lost. She muses on unresolvable ideas that have flickered at the edge of perception for countless sleepless nights."—Ian Malaney, The Irish Times""In perception, redemption,” Adnan declares in this assemblage of mystical, metaphysical ideas and aphorisms, often in conversation with the dead. “We have to say yes to that fate,” she writes of mortality, “and it’s hard, the hardest."" —Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times"Adnan’s poetics brings the feminine power of the undetermined, casting language around what cannot, ultimately, be made certain. With skill, she uses words to obscure fixed notions of what it is to be a person, to experience pain, to think about it, and refracts thought matter back to the light of the moon. “That kind of motion,” she writes, “alters the world.”"—Alisha Mascarenhas, Poetry Project Newsletter #258"Rather than pin down or bemoan our lack of perceptual surety, Adnan builds a nebula for readers to drift about. Her pages are a place for us to submerge, to question ourselves and each other even as we want to reach out and affirm that yes, we saw some nice fish down there—the colors really set off the light."—K.B. Thors, Lambda Literary"In Surge, a new book of (mostly) taut prose formations, what she is thinking about at 93 seems to be the whole range of life on earth, explored with a more palpable sense of mortality than perhaps she could have expressed at 43 or 53… The action of the book is like a sewing machine: jabbing deeply and decisively into a subject and then quickly moving on."—Katharine Coldiron, VIDA"By looking out at the universe, we are looking into ourselves. By naming that shimmering, we are piecing ourselves together. Adnan has given us a new way of thinking through ourselves and the world, our place in the universe."—Emma Ramadan, Full Stop"As a wave does. Of the sea, of emotion, of thinking. Meaning crests, blinks, and submits to the vast and chaotic flow of thought. Nothing stays. The workings of the mind keep happening. Etel Adnan’s long poem, Surge, published through Nightboat Press this summer, attunes to such a motion; humbling itself to the forces beyond a singular subjectivity. It is a philosophical succession of aphoristic thoughts, turning its reader in on herself and back out again; visiting questions of being, of perception, with the rigour of a thinker who has lived a deeply curious life."—Alisha Mascarenhas, The Poetry Project Newsletter