The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather

Book excerpt: 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."