Paige Domantey

Joani Reese is a poetry blues angel. Think of Bonnie Raitt with steel strings. Think of an embodied muse who confronts danger and loss with heart, with the kind of music that makes us forget misery for the space of art. In Night Chorus, our poet wails artfully in a disciplined and courageous manner that repairs our sense of loss. When we ask ourselves who are the living poets with vision large enough to sing not just the self but the fragile planet, and especially the most vulnerable women upon it--we look to Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Pamela Uschuk, Fady Joudah, Marilyn Hacker, and now, to Joani Reese. --Marilyn Kallet, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Tennessee, author of sixteen books, including The Love That Moves Me Joani Reese's Night Chorus is a symphony of "ferocious love" and longing "tied with gut." This powerful m lange of poems is wide-ranging in form and subject matter, imagery and sound, "a vibrating string (that) snaps to startle the ear" and the heart. I am taken with the courageous voice of this poet as she "teeters, naked on the cliff edge, wild sky black. Arms spread, she dives through the terrible rain." And, I follow her, as charmed by her sexy blues rhythms as I am by her keenings of grief as I am by the maturity of her craft. This is one book of deep songs that you will need to buy for all of your friends.--Pamela Uschuk, author Crazy Love, American Book Award, and Blood Flower What I love about Joani Reese's first full collection, Night Chorus, is how well it moves and weaves through all spaces and contains fearless characters and language. Reese writes like she's lit a typewriter on fire and only the truth will put it out. The poems in Night Chorus make me understand again why I feel so drawn to modern poetry. I thank Joani for writing this great book and for letting me read and savor it early. I appreciate the hell out of that.-Bud Smith, author of the poetry collection Everything Neon and the novels Tollbooth & F250 Night Chorus thrums through "fist-broken air," swells with rich orchestral colors, permeates and transmutes atoms like listening to Rachmaninoff 's Piano Concerto #3. Reese weaves words that make homes in our mouths, lives, secrets. This collection will swallow you whole and stun you with its bold intimacy. "Below the skull of sky, blood leaves its tail." Unforgettable and mesmerizing Night Chorus is necessary and provokes heightened awareness of our existence. -Meg Tuite, author of Bound By Blue

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.