God Save My Queen is a collection of lyrical essays drawing on a very unliterary source: 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.

Though critically reviled, Queen's music is embedded in our public consciousness, in our sports stadiums, in TV commercials, and Wayne's World. But it is a source of a deeper and more personal obsession for the author, poet, and journalist Daniel Nester. To say the least—in God Save My Queen, a short essay or riff accompanies, in order of album and track, every song recorded by the band, in chronological order, until its flopped "disco" album, 1982's Hot Space. Not quite memoir, neither prose poetry nor rock book, Nester takes up the space between genres, when a fan's life and object of obsession collide.

We learn about both the band and author through riffs, trivia, lyrics, sexual awakenings, close readings of solo albums, and scholarly, footnoted thoughts. It's an essay that pretty much posits Queen as the Rosetta Stone of all knowledge, drawing connections to everyone from Liza Minelli, Leni Riefenstahl, "Singing In The Rain," Marlene Dietrich, Billie Jean King, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury sharing a kiss in 1981, even a rant on Courtney Love's giggling over Kurt Cobain's mention of Freddie Mercury in his suicide note, which she read over PA speakers and the world in 1994.

This may sound like ironic, postmodern pedantry. And it is. But it's also a reflection of the loss of heroes, trans-Atlantic love, and how pop culture can lead to very real, poetic moments. The entries for the songs add up to a love letter to a band, and a time when all that mattered was a record player and a pair of headphones.

It will, it will, rock you.

Daniel Nester lives in Brooklyn, NY. His writing has appeared in such places as Open City, Nerve, Mississippi Review, and The New York Press. A poem of his was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa to appear in The Best American Poetry 2003. He is the editor in chief of the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule, and contrubuting editor to La Petite Zine and Painted Bride Quarterly. He is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, where he was a teaching fellow. He has taught at NYU and Parsons School of Design.