The Sun on the Tongue

"Etel Adnan is a polymath. Her work crosses many dimensions: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, tapestries, teaching, and her most recent works, her sculptures. Adnan is one of the greatest artists of our time, and an inspiration to so many other artists." * Hans Ulrich Obrist *
"Arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today." * Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States *
"Etel Adnan is a world treasure whom more of the world needs to know. Her poetry, her visual art, her longstanding feminist vision—a philosophical poethics of rage transmuted into love and vice versa—is crucial to the kinds of creative generosity that must replace our geopolitical cordoning off of the disasters of 'others.'" * Joan Retallack *
"Adnan's work is the anti-Ozymandias—a corrective to exuberant art-world bling. There is none of the bravado or self-regarding mythologizing of other artists of her stature." -- Negar Azimi * Wall Street Journal Magazine *
"An iconic Lebanese-American cultural figure." -- Nana Asfour * Paris Review *
"Her writing is as fiercely complex and political as her paintings are serenely spare and personal." -- Kaelen Wilson-Goldie * Frieze *
"With ever-increasing wisdom and clarity, Etel Adnan's work continues to illuminate the human condition. From the very distant past to the all-consuming present, she has found ways to condense intellect and emotion into surprising forms that enact the dance towards freedom." * Ammiel Alcalay *
"Etel Adnan is a remarkable visionary, poet, writer, philosopher, and painter. An intellectual mind who dares to dream. She takes us to worlds that are real and other worlds at the same time." -- Robert Wilson
"It must be evident to anyone even slightly aware of Etel Adnan's career that her work exhibits formidable intellectual and creative range. Adnan has refused to be bound by the constraints of nation, gender, genre, medium, or discipline, in order to venture into explorations of social, political, imagined, and aesthetic surfaces and sites. Over the years she has been saddened by the prevalence of suffering, and she has always been intolerant of stupidity. But at its core, her work is a manifestation of an enduring will to life and an impassioned capacity for joy." * Lyn Hejinian *
"Etel Adnan is a beacon of thought in a disrempt world. In her writing, I sense her hovering just beyond, in view but ungraspable, yet grounding me in ever changing realization: luminous company, trusted guide, necessary source of immediate information. Adnan is a visionary of the meteoric and diasporic. Oscillating between the ecstatic and the unbearable, she finds home in the evasive emplacements of each moment." * Charles Bernstein *