In 1991, I attended—as staff, mind you—the east coast YesCon, a convention for the few hundred remaining fans of the way, way, WAY past-its-prime British progressive rock group Yes. Fully conscious that Yes’s glory days happened mostly during my puréed food days—with the exception of the brief Trevor Rabin unfortunateness that brought us 90125 and other elaborate arrangements of lameness whilst I was in junior high—I nonetheless had all the ardor and zeal of any guitar player in a tribute band who listened to Tales from Topographic Oceans a few too many times after a few too many bong hits.

The convention was the wake-up call. Not because I saw what the other fans were like and worried about myself. Actually, they seemed normal. Having a good weekend. Getting a kick out of it. It wasn’t the new album, UNION, despite its brining all nine of the old members together for an orgy of pomposity, mega-arrangements, vacuous lyrics, and recycled frippery. It was the band itself. It was Trevor Rabin mocking the guitar I had worked for months to purchase. It was Jon Anderson not even showing. It was Chris Wakeman obviously tanked and full of shit. It was Tony Kaye seeming, once again, too much like a Huey Lewis-Jimmy Buffet love child to even tolerate. In short, it was the awful spectacle of a band that should have crashed, whose talents (as I understood them at the time) had once inspired hours of review, of imitation, and of ill-composed rip-offs played in bars in Conshohocken (as nice a place as its name makes it sound) and were no longer put to noble use, whose every move seemed to mock those who had come to see them. And worst, it appeared they cared not a wit.

I didn’t think of it for years. Not even after reading Nester’s first book, God Save My Queen. It was reading the second book that did it. For me, Yes devolved into a history of infighting; reckless, derivative, and unlistenable solo albums; relentless milking throughout the nineties; and dissolution into little more than a theatre act that drags its ass into Philadelphia every few years now—to the one city that still loves them. Who the hell knows why. A tangible disappointment is not the only thing that comes from fallen heroes—there is also the galling personal upbraiding you do when you ask yourself, what the hell was I thinking, even as you recognize and still harbor some of that old love. In short, and after copping to the long digression scrawled here, I have to say: Nester NAILS it.

The poems here are short and topically diverse while maintaining their focus on the abundance of detail in which fans wallow. At the same time. they are scratchy, minimal. Jacket copy describes them as part liner notes, part memoir, part poem, but the notes forget that which Nester himself probably knows well: they resemble the brevity of fan notes at the beginnings of fanzines, or in chat rooms, or in old list servs. They celebrate minutiae—quotes in the press, particular instruments played, little known stories related to the third take in a studio that never made it to the album—all the stuff the super fan knows and is able to jump into with other fans, no context required.

In fact, the entire book eschews context other than song titles, arranged in the order they appeared on albums, with the albums themselves defining sections. Even then, the “poems” do not address their songs, per se. Rather, they tell stories about them, discuss unknown aspects of the video, and allude to press remarks, or riff on the memoirist associations of the narrator, as inspired by the song. Nearly every piece is also foot-noted, and the goodies there are yet more obfuscation and fans-only references, dressed up as clarification. Consider “Invisible Man,” a typical (if such can really be said) piece:

I’m still trying to find out the word for when all the members of a band are introduced as they play, and then given four bars or so to do a little solo on the instrument mentioned. Spooky here, ’cos they already knew they wouldn’t tour.

Two chord staring contest, contrapuntal in a Ghostbusters theme key.

You have to know so much here—and frankly, I’m not sure I know all of it. But there is the fact of the introductions, the situations in which the album was recorded, the squabbles over song writing (and the lackluster songs produced), and the eighties zeitgeist regarding early soundtrack rock, the flap they received over Highlander, and so on. Put up against a band working so hard to maintain that they possess, still, the vibrancy implied by such a gimmick—that they could all solo and drag out mega-tunes in stadiums when clearly their health, relationships, and lackluster sales showed they could not—makes the piece’s end, on staring, all the more important. Each piece here stops short, as if shortcut, as if intentionally jarred to end, and to end in ambiguity, unease, abruption.

But then, that’s the story. The two narrative strands that consistently appear are clear: Freddie Mercury’s destruction and eventual death and the band’s attempts to cover it up, and the speaker’s conflict with feelings the band’s late career engendered in him: betrayal, disillusionment, disappointment, and eros. The dust-caked records, the lamentation of all the time lost to a lost cause, the pining for what awakening felt like and for remembrance of a time when music seemed so essential an element. The lengthy denouement of “Made in Heaven” provides a perfect close to a reading that takes the two books as a whole work. Nester writes, as a piece for an “Untitled Hidden Track,” “I sing these songs slow, with a 22-minutes held note behind it, the way I like it. I am trying to slow down . . . just sitting here trying to figure one happy song out, trying to bring back the feeling of new, shrink-wrapped music.// It doesn’t work. I know that when I’m finished writing this, it’s facing this.” Later, he says, in the kind of statement that gut punches the reader while careening the writer back into his own mess, “I’m not willing to say it’s all about a rock band, in other words, but know it is all about a rock band.”

Those of us who have been there—who have collected all albums and singles and rare releases, or who, like my friend Stuart, can identify the chair scrape at the end of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” provided he knocks out all the low end on a decent EQ and cranks up the right speaker, or who, like my friend Tim, who actually has Roger Dean originals in his home (and who got me into the Yes Mess in the first place)—and who have read enough to understand that it’s these odd hybrids that sometimes get it done, will most appreciate the task of Nester’s two books. Others, surely, will scratch their head and dismiss. But there are people who dismissed Queen, too. I can only imagine what Nester might say to them.