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)
Decade of Cu ts by nicky melville (ISBN: 9781916405158)
apisodes
7. Passengers
it’s all
end of the world this
end of the world that
‘s all you hear
these days
these days
we are all in this tog
ether
wake up
sunshine
you said ittake a break
from worrying
about what
you can’t con
troll
give me a coffee
and a view
of the Chrysler building
and I can write all day
tog ether
we’ll be O
K
enjoy your coffeenicky (nick-e) melville is a poet, creative writing teacher, musician and occasional artist. For over twenty years, he has been developing a range of peripheral and small press publications in a variety of forms and genres: found poetry and erasures, visual poetry, lyric experiment, conceptual and post-conceptual writing, and a badge. His work takes aim at and interrogates the imperatives of capitalism, politics and ideology. melville’s first book, selections and dissections (Otoliths Press, 2010) is a collection of visual poetry and his most recent book, ABBODIES COLD : SPECTRE (Sad Press, 2020), explores the neoliberal and fascist elements of Brexit through the lens of ABBA songs, aliens and James Bond. He makes music as Fuck This – https://fuckthis1.bandcamp.com . The catalogue of his installation DOLE can be seen at http://www.ir11.org.uk/Publications-1/DOLE-by-nick-e-melville