Description
Book SynopsisCollected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.
David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.
Trade Review"An autobiographical narrative of indefinite description but definite emotional scope sits behind the surface of the text, a surface...magically moved in and out of focus."—
Tom Mandel
"It isn’t just that this book queers the ways in which meaning is understood.... It also sites the reader in a homographical relation to language, one of having to parse what looks, or sounds, or seems 'like,' something we’re familiar with, while also abandoning previous assumptions about what this process might entail."—Colin Herd
"Melnick’s twist of “gay ethic” in poetic language makes for a brief but unforgettable oeuvre. Nice: Collected Poems proves that David Melnick is an exemplary figure of unreadability in American poetics, one who continues to teach us of unreadability’s pleasures, politics, and pains. . . [T]he posthumous volume brings the once-hermetic Melnick out into the light of new audiences." —Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Harriet
"A gem of consciousness through which facets dream of their kinfolk radiance."—Aaron Shurin
