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From the Contemporary Poetry Series #1
Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a ... Read More
Praise for In/somnia
In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realities: “in/tense/in/season.”
— Rosmarie Waldrop
The reader quickly notices that Adnan refrains from following the traditional subject, verb, object sentence patterns and invents semantic and lexical items throughout her book. Sometimes, Adnan creates an auditory effect by adding vowels to words like “feever” and “stoooory.” Other times, her words are separated by slashes, hyphens, brackets, asterisks, and question marks or are followed by arrows and colons rather than dashes… Adnan’s use of such symbols conveys the illogic of war’s logic without ever mentioning the word “war.”
— Rim Zahra and Razzan Zahra, Al Jadid