FOREWORD by Matthew Lippman
There is this moment in the sci-fi film
Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper, takes a piece of paper, folds it in half, and then sticks a pencil through the conjoined halves. He's making a point to his fellow astronauts about time and space and travel and wormholes. Theoretically speaking, wormholes don't exist on earth but they are as cool as 90s pop, rock, and punk music. And if you are the type of person who wants that outer space experience here on this planet, then you must read Daniel Nester's latest collection of poems,
Harsh Realm, and feel the pulse of New York City in the 90s.
Why? Because this book is a conduit to that time and space vortex of love. Nester, with these poems, folds that piece of paper in half, sticks that pencil through, and fires up the rocket ship and there we are, immediately, in that wormhole, cavorting with cultural icons the likes of Vince Neil, Gary Coleman, U2, Mazzy Star, Sugar Ray, Live, David Lee Roth, De La Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Octagon, even KISS.
But this is not a book solely about music or bands or movies or the 90s in NYC as experienced from a little sublet on Crosby Street at the edge of SoHo. This is a book about the emotional fever that sustains a human being who is ever-presently enamored with the mysteries of the human experience. This is a book that lets you travel back in time with the speaker, into your own heart, stumbling into that heart and vibe of grunge and AIDS and sex and youth and Abercrombie & Fitch and
Baywatch and tenderness and 1-900 sex lines and getting fucked up hurtling down the wormhole to hold onto something both nostalgic and unsentimental in hopes that when you pop out the other end, you have learned something new from the old, or, at least tasted the old and thought, "Damn, it's better now than it was then."
Harsh Realm is a book that lets you travel into the past because it's not really the past. It is a gift. It's a gift from Daniel Nester, who is working at his highest poetic powers in these poems, for us, so we can pick up the paper, through, discard the slender tool, and then jump into our own little spacecraft
to let us get to where we need to get.
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 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 Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: 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. His nonfiction has been published in New York Times, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, The Millions, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Rumpus, the Poetry Foundation website, and others, and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Now Write! Nonfiction, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll. A former sestinas editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, he edits Pine Hills Review, the online literary journal of The College of Saint Rose, where he is also professor of English.
