Journey to Mount Tamalpais

By Etel Adnan

Originally published in 1986, Journey to Mount Tamalpais is at once a deep study and a love letter of and to a mountain. A prose essay written with the lyricism and precision of a master poet, Wendell Berry calls it “one of the major works of the ‘spirit of place’ in contemporary literature.” 

With a career spanning decades, genres, and nations, Etel Adnan’s contributions to the fields of poetry, painting, philosophy, and journalism are indelible. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, her alchemical command of language is enhanced by the use of painting and drawing as exploratory tools in a meditative practice of perception—what Omar Berrada in the book’s afterword calls “a form of listening that transfigures the relation between subject and object, that reaches into layers of history buried underground.” Adnan’s encounter with the Mountain, as both its witness and its collaborator, results in this tour de force of ecological, political and poetic expression. Journey to Mount Tamalpais remains one of her most beloved works and a stunning example of her marriage of the visual and literary arts.

• Litmus Press & The Post-Apollo Press, 2021
• 2nd edition, with 9 new drawings by Etel Adnan
• Softcover, 64 pages
• 9 x 7 inches