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Nice

David Melnick
€21.99
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A01=David Melnick
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Aida
american
archival
archive
Author_David Melnick
automatic-update
avant-garde
B01=Alison Fraser
B01=Ben Friedlander
california
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DC
Category=JFSJ5
chicago
collected for the
community
COP=United States
cult
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
desire
epic
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
experimental
experimentation
first time
gay
gay radical
Homer
homophonic
landmark work
Language_English
literature
masterpiece
PA=Available
pastoral
poem
poet
poetic
poetry
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
queer
queer community
queerness
reclusive
San Francisco
softlaunch
twenty years

Product details

  • ISBN 9781643621579
  • Dimensions: 152 x 215mm
  • Publication Date: 18 Jan 2024
  • Publisher: Nightboat Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Description
Collected 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.
About David Melnick
David Melnick was born in Illinois in 1938 and raised in Los Angeles, educated at the University of Chicago (where he studied with Hannah Arendt) and the University of California at Berkeley. Although he spent time in France, Greece, and Spain (whence his mother’s ancestors emigrated in 1492), most of his adult life was centered in San Francisco. For an author’s note he once wrote, “This poet’s politics are left, his sexual orientation gay, his family Jewish…. He is short, fat, and resembles Modeste Moussorgsky in face and Gertrude Stein in body type and posture.” A participant in the Free Speech movement, Melnick was a key member of G.A.W.K. (Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) and an early inspiration to the Language Poets. His masterpiece, Men in Aida, began in a reading group organized by Robert Duncan. Melnick passed away in 2022, a day before his 84th birthday.


Benjamin Friedlander is a poet teaching at the University of Maine and editor of Robert Creeley's Selected Poems 1945-2005. 

Alison Fraser is Associate Curator of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo and editor of The Collages of Helen Adam. 

Jeffrey Jullich is a poet and lives in New York City. 

Ron Silliman is the author or editor of twenty-six books, among them The Alphabet (a long poem), the memoir Under Albany, and the watershed anthology In the American Tree (which includes the work of David Melnick).

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