Harsh Realm: My 1990s

“a terribly moving mixtape journey through that no longer quite so recent decade”

LitReactor

Advance praise

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

“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 present day with poems that refuse nostalgia and ironic detachment to deliver up the real miracle: 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 exploring that emerging sense of self, part young poser, part earnest observer of the New York City poetry 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

Excerpts and press

• Ben Tanzer reviews Harsh Realm: My 1990s in LitReactor: “a terribly moving mixtape journey through that no longer quite so recent decade, the music of the time, heavy metal and punk especially, New York City, another pretty great American City, and Philadelphia, certainly underappreciated, the poetry scene, parenthood, and all of which is presented with an unavoidable darkness if not outright sadness.”
• “Daniel Nester’s Playlist for His Poetry Collection ‘Harsh Realm’,” at Largehearted Boy.
• “It’s Raining Spiders in Brazil,” featured on Verse Daily.
• “Intersections of Style and Intentionality: Retconning the Harsh Realm of the 1990s with Daniel Nester,” an interview with poet and musician Chris Stroffolino on his Thing, October 21, 2022.
• Liz Phair read “I met Liz Phair once,” and enjoyed its ‘quality nostalgia’!
• “The death of college rock: September 5, 1995”; “On Realizing Poison’s ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ Has the Same Chords as the Replacements’ ‘Here Comes a Regular’,” Electric Literature’s The Commuter
• “Poem Written at Pete’s Candy Store Ending with a Line from Madonna”; “Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be”; and “Pompous Symmetry,” American Poetry Review
• “Lower Broadway Wednesdays, 1997-1999”; “Künstlerroman, 1996,” Tribes, A Gathering of the Tribes
• “[I can’t even say punk was important, even as it happened,]”; “Hello, Dolly”; “On the Meeting of Frank O’Hara and David Lee Roth”; “Debate Outside Four-Faced Liar, 2003”; “This Is Not a List Poem,” Court Green
• “to the heckler at my first poetry reading, 1994,” Failbetter
• “Future Days”; “Minutes Overheard from The Vagueness Society Holiday Party,” Matter Monthly
• “Heavy metal did not die in ’91,” The Daily Drunk
• “Week One Introductions, 1997,” Rejection Letters
• “Nineties Catchphrease Cento Sonnet,” Unlost
• “Gethsemane,” The Good Men Project
• “Lines composed after being told by a poet I should ‘go out in nature more often and look at chipmunks’”; “Placed into The Abyss: After Pavement’s ‘Cut Your Hair,’” The Daily Drunk
• “A List of Famous People I Saw in New York City, c. 1994-2001,” The Daily Drunk “The Failed Saratoga Colonic Fable,” Bennington Review
• “Looks That Kill,” The Hopkins Review
• “The Art of Prose (With Digressions),” Unbroken
• “Rig Rundown”; “That Twat with Jazz Hands Won’t Stop Dancing”; “Sentences on The Poem and Other Sentences”; “The Plan Shifted with a Ferocious Snap VI,” Word For/Word
• “Road House Monologue,” FreezeRay Poetry