Description

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: December 15th, 2023

Publisher Marketing: 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.