FOREWORD by Matthew Lippman
Why? Because this book is a conduit to that time and space vortex of love. Nester, with these poems, folds that piece of paper in half, sticks that pencil through, and fires up the rocket ship and there we are, immediately, in that wormhole, cavorting with cultural icons the likes of Vince Neil, Gary Coleman, U2, Mazzy Star, Sugar Ray, Live, David Lee Roth, De La Soul, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Dr. Octagon, even KISS.
But this is not a book solely about music or bands or movies or the 90s in NYC as experienced from a little sublet on Crosby Street at the edge of SoHo. This is a book about the emotional fever that sustains a human being who is ever-presently enamored with the mysteries of the human experience. This is a book that lets you travel back in time with the speaker, into your own heart, stumbling into that heart and vibe of grunge and AIDS and sex and youth and Abercrombie & Fitch and Baywatch and tenderness and 1-900 sex lines and getting fucked up hurtling down the wormhole to hold onto something both nostalgic and unsentimental in hopes that when you pop out the other end, you have learned something new from the old, or, at least tasted the old and thought, "Damn, it's better now than it was then."
Harsh Realm is a book that lets you travel into the past because it's not really the past. It is a gift. It's a gift from Daniel Nester, who is working at his highest poetic powers in these poems, for us, so we can pick up the paper, through, discard the slender tool, and then jump into our own little spacecraft
to let us get to where we need to get. Harsh Realm is a masterpiece of poetic time travel that lets us breathe differently, breathe into a time that has no beginning or middle or end; time that is an orb of music and emotion and language and heartbeat and that comes out of an unquenchable desire to love.