[A] provocative reinterpretation of poetry’s function…Here is devastating meta-poetry for the board game-playing, smartphone-scrolling masses, both accessible and enlightened. -Publisher’s Weekly
Starkweather is creating a living poetry. -C.D. Wright, author of One With Others, winner 2011 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
I am of my times and you screengrab out of ancient nowhere, is the title of a poem from Starkweather’s second collection, PAIN: The Board Game. The title perfectly captures both his 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.
PAIN:The Board Game is the first analog and online interactive book of poetry with 160 pages of poems that are as visual as they are readable and includes 15 color illustrations by artist Jon-Michael Frank.
3 shots to the chest at the arcade Sadness is my favorite video game I am its hero the little man with facial hair scampering through pixilated cities looking for clues and accumulating shit without knowing why trying not to be crushed or free fall into the not-world’s dark as 8-bit clouds scroll across the pre- programmed sky it’s exhausting but I take it next level I am happy here it feels real and I can always die
