Catalog

Ecstasy Shield

By Christopher Nealon

Black Square Edition

The chapbook Ecstasy Shield is the debut collection of Christopher Nealon, a poet who also teaches literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Its 300 copies sold out almost instantly, leading to his full-length volume, The Joyous Age (Black Square, 2003).

Ecstasy Shield is a wild and witty collection of post-New York School verse. Nealon has been called  "a gay John Ashbery" by the critic O.A. Tatlock.



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"[He] is a writer of mysterious content. There is something here of a kind of Gothic poetry, yet it is Gothic-sexual-surrealist. If I think of Auden's early work The Orators, it is to suggest a likeness and not an influence: Nealon derives from nobody but himself. Strange appeals are made with strange motivations, by moonlight as it were, but are couched in oddly reasonable terms." -- Thom Gunn