"'When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? Of course, nothing.' Adnan’s prose-poetic rumination on death would strike a chord at any time, but it feels especially apt in this moment of protracted grief. Peppered with questions—'There are so many islands I dreamed of visiting, where have they gone?'—Adnan’s lamentations are recursive and soothing. To live is to die, and the poets can ease the passage."—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"Adnan takes us from our horizons to hers—which, through that 'you,' become ours—and we are an active witness. The sun blends as the horizon blurs eyes send water down the screen of the sky to smudge that descent. Crying is a horizon. The sun ducks and we stare at it to burn a blur through. The blur is movement, not a void. To be shocked into silence isn’t to be stopped."—Molly Schaeffer, The Poetry Project Newsletter
"Life is revisited again and again in these pages; old friends are named, places from Mount Shasta to Paris are explored, and final hopes are offered ('I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons'). Each paragraph in these prose poems pushes against the idea that there is 'no resolution to somebody’s final absence.'…This memorable collection continues Adnan’s legacy as a poet of the personal, political, and cosmic."—Publishers Weekly
"This is a book of nearing endings, but it is not an end, or the end; not in the least. And one can only hope that there might be further miles for her yet to travel."—rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog
"The artist’s brightly tranquil new show at Galerie Lelong coincides with the publication of Adnan’s “Shifting the Silence,” a quietly shattering meditation on death, which interweaves memoir with observations both geopolitical and galactic. (The book’s subjects include the war in Syria, the California wildfires, and missions to Mars.) Adnan’s visual lexicon bears a rich, if elliptical, relationship to her writing; her new, pandemic-inspired painting subject is planets. A suite of vertical compositions in a candy-colored palette represents them as spheres hanging low in the sky, extraterrestrial complements to her abstract landscapes."—Johanna Fateman, The New Yorker
Praise for Etel Adnan
"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
"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
"Given the uncanny breadth of her art, Adnan is a modern-day inheritor of 20th-century avant-garde movements like Dada and surrealism in which people moved fluidly between writing and art making in one recklessly inventive swoop."—Negar Azimi, The Wall Street Journal
