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Decade of Cu ts
After many years publishing work in pamphlets, installations and small press collections – often in very limited editions – at last, a bumper Selected of 232 pages gathers poems from Scotland's favourite underground provocateur. It's time to (re-)discover the skewed wit and wisdom of nicky melville: startling, satirical and defiantly serious.
“Innovation is not simply copying previously innovative practice, but finding different ways of doing things. Nicky Melville shows us the way forward.”
—Tom Jenks (zimZilla), on ALERT STATE IS HEIGHTENED
“Tom Raworth once wrote that ‘80 percent prefer chips to poetry’. He could’ve been writing about cats, dogs, chefs or kids, but clearly those surveyed, alas, hadn’t read the poetry of nicky melville. This much-anticipated ‘new and selected’ is top tier snack box stuff for surviving a Decade of Cu ts. Through erasure, collage and prickly lyric, melville tracks the sinister language games, coincidences and contradictions within political, institutional and corporate discourse. Channelling the ambience of everyday life — from ABBA to ASDA — this book is a ‘BUG HUM’ of relentless attention, love poems and fail poems, precarity and community. Here, poetry is deep-fried, spliced and caressed, heavy salted, ghosted, shared, brought in from the cold.”
— Maria Sledmere, author of neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press)
“Innovation is not simply copying previously innovative practice, but finding different ways of doing things. Nicky Melville shows us the way forward.”
—Tom Jenks (zimZilla), on ALERT STATE IS HEIGHTENED
“Tom Raworth once wrote that ‘80 percent prefer chips to poetry’. He could’ve been writing about cats, dogs, chefs or kids, but clearly those surveyed, alas, hadn’t read the poetry of nicky melville. This much-anticipated ‘new and selected’ is top tier snack box stuff for surviving a Decade of Cu ts. Through erasure, collage and prickly lyric, melville tracks the sinister language games, coincidences and contradictions within political, institutional and corporate discourse. Channelling the ambience of everyday life — from ABBA to ASDA — this book is a ‘BUG HUM’ of relentless attention, love poems and fail poems, precarity and community. Here, poetry is deep-fried, spliced and caressed, heavy salted, ghosted, shared, brought in from the cold.”
— Maria Sledmere, author of neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press)
232 pages, Paperback
First published July 20, 2021
2 people want to read
About the author
Nicky Melville
6 booksNick E. Melville has had poems published in Cutting Tech, Five Leaves Left, The Herald, Haiku Quarterly, Island Lallans, Nerve, New Writing Scotland 19, Nomad, Northwords, Poetry Scotland, Product, Spoke, Underword and xStream. He is a graduate, with distinction, of the MPhil Creative Writing Course at the University of Glasgow.
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August 23, 2021
This is a fun-filled, clever and sharp collection – sharp enough it can cut! Reading this collection takes you inside Nicky Melville’s head – a little it does – and you see the world through his eyes, aslant, and he shows you what is really right there under your nose except you never noticed it before. Reading this collection you will laugh – out loud sometimes – but you will also smart, stung by the papercuts of his observations. This is writing with a conscience. Read it!
Displaying 1 of 1 review