Synopses & Reviews
God Save My Queen is a collection of lyrical essays drawing on a very unliterary source: the British rock band Queen.
World famous in the 1970s for such songs as "We Will Rock You," "We Are The Champions," "Another One Bites The Dust," and the mock-opera epic "Bohemian Rhapsody," the band ended its run in 1991 with the death of its flamboyant lead singer, Freddie Mercury, from AIDS.
Though critically reviled, Queen's music is embedded in our public consciousness, in our sports stadiums, in TV commercials, and Wayne's World. But it is a source of a deeper and more personal obsession for the author, poet, and journalist Daniel Nester. To say the least in God Save My Queen, a short essay or riff accompanies, in order of album and track, every song recorded by the band, in chronological order, until its flopped "disco" album, 1982's Hot Space. Not quite memoir, neither prose poetry nor rock book, Nester takes up the space between genres, when a fan's life and object of obsession collide.
We learn about both the band and author through riffs, trivia, lyrics, sexual awakenings, close readings of solo albums, and scholarly, footnoted thoughts. It's an essay that pretty much posits Queen as the Rosetta Stone of all knowledge, drawing connections to everyone from Liza Minelli, Leni Riefenstahl, "Singing In The Rain," Marlene Dietrich, Billie Jean King, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury sharing a kiss in 1981, even a rant on Courtney Love's giggling over Kurt Cobain's mention of Freddie Mercury in his suicide note, which she read over PA speakers and the world in 1994.
This may sound like ironic, postmodern pedantry. And it is. But it's also a reflection of the loss of heroes, trans-Atlantic love, and how pop culture can lead to very real, poetic moments. The entries for the songs add up to a love letter to a band, and a time when all that mattered was a record player and a pair of headphones.
It will, it will, rock you.
Review
"A book of poems about rock albums that's the size of a single suggests concept-focus issues....Curiously, Nester's best poems the ones where his observations and language get in each other's way the least are inspired by Queen's most famous songs. But like the records it celebrates, the book's filler-prone and itching for a greatest hits." Douglas Wolk, Village Voice
Review
"Nester's method considers a serious fan's bliss impeccably....Many of Nester's best poems consider the homosexual allure of the band's late singer, Freddie Mercury, describing Mercury's gestures, phrasing and lifestyle with aplomb." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"This book is touching, highly literate, thought provoking and very funny, in every way as over-the-top as Queen ever was." Maximum Rock N Roll
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"God Save My Queen is one part obsessed fan tribute and two parts Whitmanesque exaltation of the human." Maria Garcia Tabor, The Homestead Review
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"God Save My Queen is funny and sorrowful and strange, just like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was before the buffoons stole it away, just like being young and alive was before we got old and alive. Nester has wrested it all back for us in this antic, tender book." Sam Lipsyte, author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive
Review
"Daniel Nester is a transcendent trickster, a Gogol of Rock 'n' Roll. This book is not, like so much contemporary fiction, merely a realistic snapshot of life, but an ambitious effort to find in music the rhythms of life itself." Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy
Review
"There are so many great lines in this book ('Many guitar swells can't be transcribed'/'How wonderfully nude and fuckable I am'), I want to hear them all strung/sung together in one giant pop song. God Save My Queen will rock you." Amy Fusselman, author of The Pharmacist's Mate
Review
"Out of the aptly named town of Cherry Hill, a desert island eight-track full of praise song and lament for kings and queen, and for, yes, oh, yes, Queen (it, him, her) self. It's Mercury rising." Reamy Jansen, Bloomsbury Review of Books
Review
"Part coming of age diary, part cultural critique (and pop/rock culture celebration!), Daniel Nester's brilliant tour de force God Save My Queen wickedly exploits the romance of rock 'n' roll to explore the shifting contours and constraints of contemporary sexuality not to mention the way he takes the pulse of that relentless back-beat of Time itself! The band Queen becomes, all at the same time, the backdrop, the soundtrack, and the lens through which the poet's experiences are seen. Trust me: you've never seen anything like this ambitious and compelling book of poems." David St. John, author of Study for the World's Body and The Red Leaves of Night
Synopsis
Queens music is embedded in the popular consciousness from sports stadiums and TV commercials to endless radio replay and Waynes World. For Daniel Nester, it is also an enduring personal obsession. God Save My Queen explores the parallel lives of author and band through riffs, trivia, lyrics, sexual awakenings, close readings of albums, and scholarly footnoted thoughts. It draws connections to everyone from Liza Minnelli to Leni Riefenstahl, including such moments as Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercurys sharing a kiss in 1981. Part memoir, part prose poetry, part rock book, God Save My Queen occupies the singular place where a fans life and a fans fixation collide. This collection of lyrical, loopy riffs celebrating the rock band Queen includes a short take on every song recorded by the band.
Description
God Save My Queen (ISBN:1887128271) is published by the Brooklyn-based independent publisher Soft Skull Press. The book's cover art is a detail from original artwork by world renowned science fiction and fantasy artist Frank Kelly Freas, whose work originally appeared on the cover and gatefold of Queen's 1977 album News Of The World. The book's shape is seven inches square, the same as a vinyl 45 rpm record.
About the Author
Daniel Nester lives in Brooklyn, NY. His writing has appeared in such places as Open City, Nerve, Mississippi Review, and The New York Press. A poem of his was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa to appear in The Best American Poetry 2003. He is the editor in chief of the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule, and contrubuting editor to La Petite Zine and Painted Bride Quarterly. He is a graduate of New York Universitys creative writing program, where he was a teaching fellow. He has taught at NYU and Parsons School of Design.