Form - from SD

“Outside of human consciousness is there an issue?" Making "a poetics of spaces,"
Nakell in a middle space empties identity of one into "we" (or "you" who is part of "we").
As rumination, subjects we/you and volcanic eruptions, sunsets, or rain have the same
relation to that space as would notes of music. Rather than negation, lines-thought is
substitution, as if mathematically substituting sunset for human consciousness on
which the sunset is predicated: "To conceive of the fact that no issue may exist outside
of human consciousness/is a concept within the framework of human consciousness."
For the impalpable or impossible, he substitutes our language: "There is no such thing
as a tangent to still air." Leslie Scalapino

The forms that inhabit this startling and endlessly inventive book are the complex and
often contradictory structures of our deepest ideas, drives, and desires. They are
restless forms, constantly shifting and changing, and Martin Nakell’s brilliant, precise
language charts their every movement with grace and wit. These poems are living
things, and they will continue to expand as they reach each reader’s own DNA.
Christopher Reiner

Martin Nakell : The Myth of Creation (Parentheses Writing Series), a chapbook of fiction, Ramon,
and the novels The Library of Thomas Rivka (Sun & Moon Press) and Two Fields That Face &
Mirror Each Other (2001, Sun & Moon Press). Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award in Poetry for
1996-199 and an NEA Interarts Grant, he was also a finalist for the America' s Award in Fiction,
1997 (for The Library of Thomas Rivka), a finalist in the New American Poetry Series for 1999.

Nakell has published poetry and fiction extensively in journals, including recent publications of
poetry in Proliferations (San Francisco), Ribot (Los Angeles), ReMap (Boston and Los Angeles),
and fiction in Literal Latte (New York), Hanging Loose (New York), Hyper Age (San Francisco),
Subvoicity (London). Three chapters from Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other have
been published in literary journals, including Washington Review and Onyx.

He has held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (poetry), from the Blue
Mountain Center (fiction and screenwriting), from Writers and Books (poetry and fiction), from the
State University of New York at Albany; he has received grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, from Chapman University, from the University of California. He was a panelist for the
America Awards in fiction for 1998, a panelist for the Los Angeles Arts Commission in 1999, and
serves on the panel of the "100 Most Important Books of the Twentieth Century" for The Encyclopedia
of Twentieth Century Literature of The Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc. Recently, Visual
Poetics, Inc., a Los Angeles film company, optioned three of his short stories (Ramon; Thomas;
Monsieur B., the Irish Poet), for a film entitled A Heisenberg Trilogy.

Martin Nakell earned a Doctorate of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany, and is
Professor of Literature at Chapman University, and Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the
University of California at San Diego.