Time

There is a lot happening in these meditative postcards, from bombs dropping in Beruit to a return to Greece, sculptures or stripmining in California, composing a sequence of lyric sketches aware of and very concerned with how easily humanity turns against itself and its own interests, from the larger issues of planetary survival, to the intimate matters of how one person treats another… Yet her poems are filled with such a wonder and an openness, one that shows a wisdom, and, despite everything, an optimism and heart.

“Through this rejection of boundaries, Adnan delivers an incomparable magnitude of emotional wisdom on the uncertainties that press on through life, writing both clarity and complication into our experience of reality.”

TIME featured on Librarie Drawn & Quarterly’s 2019 Staff Picks!

Adnan poetically navigates the currents of desperation and hope with a clarity placed on the page in short stanzas that we can pick up and roll over in our minds again and again. Like the short lines written on the back of a postcard, the aphoristic quality of these verses allows them to take on different lives. They can be worked over with a different temporality as we return to them for multiple readings, as we explore how they interact with the preceding or following ones, and as we observe how they take on new shapes.

Time is a place where language creates the meaningful space between souls, and the great threat to the truth. Time is a place where communication is sacred, where “love is the subversion of / death”, true living, and the body is a communicator of the self. “Describe the body / if you can / and you will see how unlikely / your soul is.” The body then too is essential to language, to communication, to the “inbetween” as “it bursts with life and lasts / briefly.” And its greatest threat is time. Adnan urges we “listen to the sound of [our] arteries.” She means everything has something to tell us. Everything is offering us an inbetween to come alive in, and we only have so long.

Time is a stunning prism of a book, rich in music and in vision, architectural in scale, from an infinitely intelligent and humane poet.