Harsh Realm: My 1990s

by Daniel Nester

“All I’ve ever done is sing along,” writes Daniel Nester in Harsh Realm. Equal parts music ethnography, punk protest, and homage to the New York School, this ingenious collection takes us on a rollicking tour of the “layered decade” of the 90s to the present day with remixed poems that refuse nostalgia and ironic detachment to deliver up the real an anthem with the power to save. —Virginia Konchan Daniel Nester’s Harsh Realm is a mixtape of poems weirdly paired with songs of the time, like playing TLC’s “Waterfalls” on repeat while waiting for the results of his first AIDS test. Nester describes with love the shifting trends in 90s music, and explores his own emerging sense of self, part young poser, part earnest observer of the New York City poetry and punk scenes. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to an Irish bar in the West Village, Nester details with humor and vulnerability his own emergence into adulthood. Word to your mother. —Tracey Knapp Daniel Nester’s Harsh Realm is a masterpiece of poetic time travel that lets us breathe differently, breathe into a time that has no beginning or middle or end; time that is an orb of music and emotion and language and heartbeat and that comes out of an unquenchable desire to love. Daniel Nester is working at his highest poetic powers in these poems. —Matthew Lippman (from the foreword) Daniel Nester is a poet, nonfiction writer, teacher, and editor. His previous books include Shader, a memoir; How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction; The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited; and the poetry collection The History of My World Tonight. His first two books, God Save My A Tribute and God Save My Queen The Show Must Go On, are hybrid collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Barrelhouse, The Hopkins Review, Word For/Word, Court Green, Love’s Executive Order, and other publications.

69 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Daniel Nester is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Morning News, The Rumpus, Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, hilarious, nostalgic, and a reminder that all the 90s pop culture throwback moments we infuse into every goddamn thing produced nowadays were actually lived though, worked through, suffered through, delighted through, and fumbled through with all the grit and awkwardness one tends to forget. But looking back is still one hell of a trip. Excellent poetry here. Well worth the price of admission.

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New York school of poetry (digressive observational acumen, high and low registers, painterly tableaux of history, found language, dialogic wit, and delight in the quotidian and everyday) may have petered out with the onslaught of late capitalism and the grief an era of autocratic despotism yields, but Daniel Nester's Harsh Realm: My 1990s fights back with poems of raucous alacrity and hope, tracing a complex personal, musical, and cultural history without sacrificing lyric to documentary and never losing the beat. A neo-epic that recalls an afterparty to the debut of "Bohemian Rhapsody" to mind, these poems are reft with the grit of real life, the pain of loss, and the triumph of art.