Shifting the Silence by Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, paperback)
Publication Date: October 27, 2020
Publisher Marketing: Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the ongoing war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan's window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.
