A poetic navigation through the Nineties, Daniel Nester’s Harsh Realm is a palooza of a collection, nimble of word and beautifully designed. Its poems reveal the moving parts of someone who, it would seem, doesn’t cease movement of geography or vision. While many of the poems are reflective, romantic, revelatory, you know, poemy, the opener, “My 1990s,” is the equivalent of a James Bond balletic car chase, as well as a précis of celebration: a united Germany revels in newfound freedom; a representative of U.S. pop culture croons amid the stars; and the narrator, Daniel Nester, a Zelig of sorts, moves into a station of adulthood: “My 1990s.”
A few seconds into midnight, January 1, 1990, “… a crane hoists David Hasselhoff above remains of the Berlin Wall as he sings ‘Looking for Freedom.’” This is fact. I checked. Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff was lifted as if by angels, and televised worldwide. Meanwhile, Daniel Nester smuggles “five friends across East Germany …” [to the West]; assists five human beings’ escape from the lingering Stasi stench. Later that night, West Berlin police run into Nester and some of his Rutgers classmates; assume the kids are Germans; and, “Stars & Stripes runs / a photo of us, swigging / champagne.”
The poem leaps to 1999 when we were warned computer networks were about to crash all that was holy in capitalism. And to a rooftop in Brooklyn: “I hold / on to my aunt Esther’s / diamond ring to propose / to Maisie.” Asks, “Why did I pick the moment / when everyone thinks the world / will end or at least our / computers blow up?” The systems proved smarter than their creators and nothing blew up. I remember. Here in Manhattan the night air was soft, as if the universe had just returned from a timeout in Fiji.
Nester teaches at The College of Saint Rose and is faculty adviser for its journal, Pine Hills Review (which took two of my poems). He is, also, an acknowledged Queen and Freddie Mercury expert—ask Rolling Stone. In accord, poems in Harsh Realm are preceded by a song pairing. “October 3, 1995,” a prose poem chronicling the final day of Nester’s two-week wait for HIV test results and the final day of global anticipation of the O.J. verdict, is paired with “Waterfalls” by the girl group TLC. Our sommelier of song flashes on his October 3, 1995:
When the morning finally came, I wore tight jeans, shaved,
and plank-walked uptown from SoHo one last time, kicked
broccoli florets down Broome Street one last time, chased
waterfalls with three letters on my mind one last time. I
remember thinking this would be the most elegant way to
die. I remember thinking all that praying didn’t help me at
all. The results came on the same day as the verdict for O.J.
O. J. was acquitted, as you know, and Daniel Nester learned he was “disease free.” Decades of hypnagogic pop, emo rap, disco, plunderphonics lay before him. And “all that praying” did help, if I may. Neither divine intervention nor the blessing of Queen, Prince, Rick James, Etta James, Alice Coltrane, Ella, Aretha, Carol King, or Ronald Isley are guaranteed, but intention, and the motion of reaching out … that stuff has its own energy.
In the lovely “From My Desk, c. 1997” Nester reflects on a defeatism common among poets and artists: Do decades, if not centuries of our poetic tranquility recollected vanish? (Wordsworth (very) famously suggested poetry was “emotions reflected in tranquility.”) Some of my most fervent discussions with poets broach this mystery, but, pro tip: If you entertain a big picture spirituality, don’t argue with a defeatist; not worth your time. See “From My Desk, c. 1997”:
And I read poems from old magazines
by people never heard from again.
And I read them all—poems about kites
and maps and turtles, mothers in waiting rooms.
And I mock-gouge my eyes out, head-shakes
above the eggshell pages. And I scold
this grouch in these eye-sockets.
And I open the window to take in
the just-warm breeze. And I wave my head around
as a boy brave-arms from a car, palm-lifts,
boy-hairs ruffled. And I think how air thins out underneath
fast-moving things, and I see my own terrible ideas
vanish in the soft air of Brooklyn. And I think
how this will never get old—more obscure people
will always throw more things up in the air.
“… as a boy brave-arms from a car, palm-lifts, / boy-hair ruffled” Paint a tender picture, why don’t you. “… this will never get old …” Agreed. Throwing “more things up in the air” is a workable definition of writing poetry. Harsh Realm offers compelling reactions to this living-thing we’re born into, a book as chronicle—think Pepys and London—of, mainly, New York. Daniel Nester is a poet who must be read.
Harsh Realm, by Daniel Nester. Brooklyn, New York: Indolent Books, May 2022. 84 pages. $18.00, paper.
Sarah Sarai’s collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay), is available on Amazon. Her poems have been anthologized in Say It Loud: Poems About James Brown (Whirlwind); Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poetry (Sundress); Ocellus Reseau Pathology (Other Rooms Press); Like a Fat Gold Watch: Sylvia Plath Poems (FGW); Composing Poetry (Kendall-Hunt), and many other anthologies. Born in a former speakeasy on Long Island, she now lives in NYC, where she is an independent editor and park whisperer.
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