Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "sampson-starkweather"
Sampson Starkweather
T.R.U.E., Week of 7/22 (Special All-Canadians Edition), Post #3
Sampson Starkweather The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather
Who is he. this Sampson Starkweather? It was the name that made me drag the book off the shelf at Type, one of Toronto's fabulous little repositories of books not nearly enough people know about. And the title. Clearly, a career someone must have noted, right? Then I started flipping around, at random. Catching, repeatedly, at lines that flashed like a thousand pennies at the bottom of a well, just out of my reach. I probably stood there for twenty minutes. Then I went to the very informed clerk at the counter. He said, "Yeah, that book is AMAZING. It just showed up. We've never heard of him before." There's an intro in the book, by Jared White. Maybe Jared knows him. But you wouldn't know it by this intro.
Amazon has a bio up. It says Sampson lives with an escape artist named Paige. So that's helpful.
But the WORK!
Here's just one set of snippets. From one of those little flashing-penny paragraphs. And the thing is, they're ALL this good:
"Now I'm writing to you from inside your left lung, which, being slightly smaller than your right lung, makes room for your heart...the entire world rises in your chest, a wave on the precipice of a kiss...You should really come see what it's like down here...So many vibrant fires raving and playing truant in my troubled water. The debris of this sea--my smoldering desire. And you go on breathing normally."
See?
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Books...
Sampson Starkweather The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather
Who is he. this Sampson Starkweather? It was the name that made me drag the book off the shelf at Type, one of Toronto's fabulous little repositories of books not nearly enough people know about. And the title. Clearly, a career someone must have noted, right? Then I started flipping around, at random. Catching, repeatedly, at lines that flashed like a thousand pennies at the bottom of a well, just out of my reach. I probably stood there for twenty minutes. Then I went to the very informed clerk at the counter. He said, "Yeah, that book is AMAZING. It just showed up. We've never heard of him before." There's an intro in the book, by Jared White. Maybe Jared knows him. But you wouldn't know it by this intro.
Amazon has a bio up. It says Sampson lives with an escape artist named Paige. So that's helpful.
But the WORK!
Here's just one set of snippets. From one of those little flashing-penny paragraphs. And the thing is, they're ALL this good:
"Now I'm writing to you from inside your left lung, which, being slightly smaller than your right lung, makes room for your heart...the entire world rises in your chest, a wave on the precipice of a kiss...You should really come see what it's like down here...So many vibrant fires raving and playing truant in my troubled water. The debris of this sea--my smoldering desire. And you go on breathing normally."
See?
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Books...
