Illustrated with etchings by Russell Chatham
The poems come from Albuquerque, Beirut, Damascus, the Amazon Basin, the air over Hiroshima, the burial grounds both honored and dishonored all over the world. Counterposed to violence and destruction, they offer witness and harbor in love.
Etel Adnan
Praise for The Indian Never Had a Horse & Other Poems
Etel Adnan is betting her own discrete rhythms against the rivers of blood that wind their way through this century. The Indian Never Had a Horse is a breathing in and out of that history, over the years. Adnan is as quick among the many dead as we are quick to move gracefully in an embrace, or to be plucked from it. These poems are a warning, an entreaty, an acknowledgement of where we find ourselves. And they are an act of love.
— Jane Creighton
She has an exceptional gift for the mystical delineation of an immediate experience and achieves an otherworldly density of image, line after line. Etel Adnan with this book of poems establishes herself as a major poet who belongs beside internationally established poets like Tranströmer, Bly, Neruda, Vallejo, and Pessoa.
— Eric Sellin, Celfan Review
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
Adnan is the first woman in Arab literary history who has addressed her love poetry to a woman, first in “Five Senses For One Death” and then in “Love Poems,” both in The Indian Never Had a Horse & Other Poems.
— Feminist Bookstore News
