Synopsis
God Save My Queen: The Show Must Go On by Daniel Nester continues the theme from his first book--how his personality and aesthetic was shaped by Freddie Mercury and 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. But it is a source of a deeper and more personal obsession for the author, poet and journalist Daniel Nester. As for the first volume, a short essay, or riff, accompanies, in order of album and track, of Queen's last five studio albums The "plot points" covered here would be the band's retreat from the United States -- timed almost exactly when the author proclaims Queen his "favorite band" -- as well as Queen's triumphant performance at Live Aid, European tours, and the band's retreat into secrecy as Freddie Mercury deals with HIV/AIDS, the decline of Mercury's health and his eventual death. Not quite memoir, neither prose poetry nor rock book, it will, it will nonetheless, rock you.
About the Author
Daniel Nester's most recent book, How to Be Inappropriate, described as "a deeply funny new collection of booger-flecked nonfiction" in Time Out New York, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2010. He is editor of The Incredible Sestina Anthology, published by Write Bloody Publishing in 2013.
Nester's first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute (Soft Skull, 2003) and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems.
As a journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Salon, The New York Times, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, The Rumpus, N+1, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the Poetry Foundation website.
His work has been anthologized in such collections as Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, Now Write! Nonfiction, and Isn't It Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. His poems have appeared in such journals as Coconut, Shampoo, Taint, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, jubilat, Crazyhorse, Open City, Slope, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other places. He is the former editor of the online journals Unpleasant Event Schedule and La Petite Zine and worked as Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Currently, he is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where he teaches creative nonfiction and poetry and is on the core faculty of their M.F.A. program in creative writing.
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