PAIN: The Board Game

"[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 AwardI 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 gameI am its herothe little man with facial hairscampering through pixilated citieslooking for cluesand accumulating shitwithout knowing whytrying notto be crushedor free fallinto the not-world's darkas 8-bit cloudsscroll across the pre-programmed skyit's exhaustingbut I take itnext levelI am happy hereit feels realand I can always die.