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)