Time Out of Time

Award-winning poet Arleen Par? pays homage to the work of lesbian Syrian American poet Etel Adnan. If books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then Time Out of Time is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnan's astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in Time Out of Time are in love with the poems in Adnan's Time and, it seems, Par? has fallen in love with Time's author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painter--or perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnan's words. Par?'s poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of Time Out of Time, creating a rare intimacy in Par?'s collection. Par?'s work pays homage to Adnan's work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in "stanza after sweet-smelling stanza," Par? attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the world's general collapse.