The Desert Poems of Southern California

Martin Nakell

 

ISBN 978-1941550-34-2     $10.00        86 pages

Poems written in various Locales by a gifted realist of the epiphenomenally fantastical proposition of being energetically human.

There is an existential angst in many of the poems. The reader can relate to that feeling intimately if she is to consider a triumvirate of questions as essential to every reflective individual: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? The poems ultimately reveal the fractal nature of our contrived taxonomies.

    Jorge Armenteros in Rain Taxi

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 (poetry, Parentheses Writing), Ramon (fiction, Jawbone Press/The National Endowment for the Arts), The Library of Thomas Rivka (fiction, Sun & Moon), Two Fields that Face & Mirror Each Other (fiction, Green Integer), Goings (fiction, Margin-to-Margin), Form (poetry, Spuyten Duyvil), Settlement (fiction, Spuyten Duyvil), Tautological Eye (poetry, Spuyten Duyvil), A Subset of Chance (poetry, Libellulae/Proteus Gowanus), Unnamed: The Emotions (poetry, Jaded Ibis Press, forthcoming 2015), Monk (fiction, Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming 2015), The Desert Poems of Southern California (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming 2015), Is (poetry, LitFest Press, forthcoming 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.