Is

Publisher Marketing: IS Several forms of language - poetry, prose, dialogue, essay, opera - take shape in Is. Once we use language with imagination, the definitions/constrictions of traditional form fall away. All writing = all writing. The Chaos Theory of Literary Composition puts it this way: art is energy. To achieve chaos, which releases energy, the writer subjects the writing to heat {in the Chaos Theory of physics, that heat is literal, i.e. fire), i.e., passion, intuition, defamilarization, disruption of syntax, style, genre, spontaneity, the unreal, the unexpected, etc. etc. etc. That state of chaos reveals new form, that chaos opens fissures along which the energy travels and along which the reader engages that energy. IS, putatively the passive verb, includes in it all that is, all the energy we, as artists, bring to the work. Yet, IS, as what we call the passive verb, is a fiction. Like zero in mathematics, the "is" in our work, in the title to this book, isness, does not exist in the real world, but it functions to make everything else work. There is no object - no noun - no thing - that does nothing, that is not an action. Action = energy. Art is energy. The title IS references this nothing which is not, and this - every word - every world - every thing which is, the action inherent in being, including the heat that creates chaos that reveals new form. Contributor Bio:  Nakell, Martin Winner of a Gertrude Stein Award in Poetry and an NEA grant, among other awards, Martin Nakell is a fictionalist and poet who believes that the experience of art is energy--released by the disruption of form--creating fissures along which that energy travels, where the reader encounters it (Chaos Theory of Literary Composition). He has published The Myth of Creation (Parentheses Writing, 1993), Ramon (Jawbone Press/The National Endowment for the Arts, 1983), THE LIBRARY OF THOMAS RIVKA (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), Two Fields that Face & Mirror Each Other (Green Integer, 2001), Goings (Margin-to-Margin Books, 2002), Form (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), SETTLEMENT (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), TAUTOLOGICAL EYE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), A Subset of Chance (Libellulae/Proteus Gowanus), Unnamed: The Emotions (Jaded Ibis Press, 2015), MONK (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), THE DESERT POEMS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), and Is (LitFest Press, 2015). Reviewing SETTLEMENT, Mad Hatter's Review writes: "Nakell has achieved something in SETTLEMENT...nearly impossible and would likely be disastrous if undertaken by a less skilled writer...to create a unique and ground-breaking work of literature...celebrating...[E]very human's...primal urge to create something from nothing." And The Review of Contemporary Fiction "SETTLEMENT confirms Nakell's emerging style, one that manages to be both compelling and rigorous." He lives in Orange County, California; he teaches at Chapman University. Contributor Bio:  Domantey, Paige Joani Reese is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Final Notes and Dead Letters. Night Chorus is her first full length collection. Reese's poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and featured in both print and online venues. Reese has been poetry editor for THIS Magazine and senior poetry editor for Connotation Press-An Online Artifact and was fiction guest editor for Scissors and Spackle in 2013 & 2014. Reese is currently Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine MadHat Lit, the quarterly online presence of MadHat Publishing. Reese won the first Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize for her flash fiction and The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis for her poetry, where she earned her MFA. Reese won the 15th Glass Woman Prize in 2014 for her flash fiction and currently lives in Texas with six fine cats and three lovely men.