Since she has been thinking and feeling, the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan has been a passionate contemporary. Her writing and painting repeatedly respond to events in contemporary history, to wars, devastations, and massacres, especially in the Arab world. One of these responses, perhaps Adnan's most important, is "Arab Apocalypse," a cycle of 59 poems. It conjures, with laconic absurdity, a cosmos that is out of joint, where suffering and despair are dressed in astonished registers. Where language falters, pictorial signs take over. As a painter, she did not learn from writing, but as an author, she certainly learned from painting, Adnan writes: the certainty of her assertions - in the conviction that they clearly signal what it is about, beyond literal translation into our repertoires. "Arab Apocalypse," written.