Author(s): Sampson Starkweather

Poetry

Poetry. As Jared White points out in his introduction to THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER, We live in an era when a book of poems is often a 50-80 page manuscript bound with a thin mustache of a spine. THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER seeks to upend this orthodoxy.Distinct but kindred, these books are like four ecologically diverse quadrants of one realm, in a Disneyworld of poetry's possibilities. The poems themselves are invested in the purity of experiences and the varieties of contemporary language--news reports, video games, WWF wrestling, Mike Tyson. These poems are, as White puts it, a phantasmagoria worthy of Arthur Rimbaud but a 'Rimbaud chugging Robotussin(R).'THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is no less than this: a book of books about the lonely yearning to be transformed by poetry, and through poetry, transform the world.THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER are King of the Forest, La La La, The Waters, and Self Help Poems.