A meditative collection of poems written more in the style of vignettes than anything, Adnan focuses on the vastness of the universe and the daunting nature of time, bringing great knowledge and wisdom to these topics as someone who saw and experienced much of the world for decades. Shifting the Silence is a dense book to get through, but this shouldn’t come as a total surprise, considering that it was written by a woman in her nineties deeply reflecting on existential themes. It really did feel as though I was gaining wisdom of some kind as I was reading these vignettes, and I appreciated the frankness in Adnan’s discussions on mortality, which undoubtedly is something that weighs heavily on the minds of many elderly people. There is also a stream-of-consciousness approach in this collection that sometimes makes it difficult to parse out what exactly Adnan is thinking about, but I also read this as almost deliberate, that this was, ultimately, written for herself, with the readers being given privilege to peer into her personal musings.