Pain: The Board Game

"Not only thrillingly accessible, not only deeply thought-provoking, but also, and without exaggeration, historically important."The Huffington Post

I am of my times and you screengrab out of ancient nowhere, the title of one of the poems in Starkweather’s second collection,PAIN: The Board Game, perfectly capture both his utter contemporariness and his empathetic treatment of our most primal conditions: "dis- / appointment / & misery / & helplessness / & suffering / & pain / & fear."

As he deploys the #trending and vintage lexicons of technology and pop culture with the depth and ease of a true lyricist, Starkweather pushes his poems into the territory of universal affect and risky humanity, to the root of our desire to connect. This is the contemporary poem that, just after it has "Shazamed / your orgasm" resurrects "the rough magic / of bodies / illuminating / the lack / of any / limitation / when one." Starkweather’s unyielding, funny, luminous poetry is a brand new classic.

Sampson Starkweather is a new American meta-realist poet born in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He is the author ofiThe First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather and a founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He is the author of 9 chapbooks, includingFlowers of Rad by Factory Hollow Press, the collaborative audio poetry albumFlux Capacitor from Black Cake Records, and Until the Joy of Death Hits, a multi-media website of pop/love GIF poems from Spork Press. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.