PAIN: The Board Game

“Not only thrillingly accessible, not only deeply thought-provoking, but also, and without exaggeration, historically important."—The Huffington Post PAIN: The Board Game is 160 pages of poetry, 15 full color illustrations by Jon-Michael Frank, and the first book of poetry that is both page-turning-analog and online interactive. And, to accompany the book, finally, what everyone has waited for, a kick-ass video game based on a poetry book rather than FIFA, alien invasion, or Seal Team 6. Now all you gamers out there can experience what pixilated, dark haired poet Sampson Starkweather experiences: PAIN. No more can society argue that video game culture has usurped activities such as reading. Play the game. Taste the PAIN. Then, inflict more PAIN on your-self-abusing-selves, sitting in your dark rooms, cathode blue computer colored faces, still arguing Atari vs Intellivision, or the processing power of this-or-that latest console, and order PAIN: The Board Game by Sampson Starkweather, the fourth title from Third Man Books. 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 captures 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. when I die will someone please keep me alive in Second Life my password to all things is pipedream! don’t forget the exclamation point and feel free to bring flowers fuck the sniper in the mall I leave a hole in everything “Starkweather’s poetry is so real, so stunning, so emotionally accurate and strange…I find with each poem I’m laughing out loud. But also putting my hand over my heart, in a futile effort to keep the damn thing still.” —Bianca Stone, author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows “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 Author:   Sampson Starkweather Sampson Starkweather is a new American meta-realist poet born in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He is the author of PAIN: The Board Game (Third Man Books, 2015) and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather (Birds, LLC, 2013) and a founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He is the author of nine chapbooks, including Flowers of Rad by Factory Hollow Press, the collaborative audio poetry album Flux 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.