Honey in the Tape Deck

From the author of the groundbreaking debut The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather which “took the poetry world by storm”, to the follow-up, initially banned, instant classic PAIN: The Board Game, comes the eagerly anticipated mega collection Honey in the Tape Deck: New & Uncollected Poems. Over 20 years in the making, which for the first time collects the very best of Starkweather’s enthralling poetry. Honey offers new writing alongside a wide range of unpublished or out-of-print underground cult classics from Starkweather’s trademark wit, attunement to the absurd and dark comic illuminations of truth, to the flowing lyric sublime and surreal sprawling cinematic poems embodied with vivid images and metaphors, all set to an irresistible rhythm. Honey is simultaneously tender, revolutionary, dire, heartbreaking, critical, sensual, thought-provoking, chiseled to crystallized precision, full of near constant surprise and fun. Both contemporary and timeless, these are poems that are useful and instructive in any era-- whether to start a riot, as a balm for the soul, or to make you feel less alone. Starkweather’s writing is always generous and inviting, bringing the reader along, like a cloaked guide to the night, to life, to possibility... beckoning, come, follow me, enter. The poems in Honey in the Tape Deck, full of play, push the limits of imagination, language, and of what’s possible in a poem (and we all know anything can happen in a poem!): Horses escaping on an LA Freeway, looting dust from the museum of the moon, a green bull sitting in a yellow corvette at a red light, rain that goes the wrong way, drinking a beer and reading poems with the Incredible Hulk, every bullet ever reversing back into their barrels, back into soft metals, back into the earth to sleep for eternity... inviting us into it’s wild generous dream.

Sampson Starkweather is the author of PAIN: The Board Game and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, A Week in Late Capitalism / Ancient Capitalistic Proverbs, Song of Attention Deficit Disorder, and over a dozen chapbooks from dangerous and/or defunct underground small presses. He is a founding editor of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC. He lives in Brooklyn and works for the Center for the Humaniteis at the CUNY Graduate Center where he helped found the NYC Chapbook Festival and helps run the archival press Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.