Honey in the Tape Deck
SKU: TMB066
Date: 11/10/2026
ISBN: 9798992483871
Author: Sampson Starkweather
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“Sampson Starkweather’s poems amaze in their first-person anecdotal structure and their overt refusal to say something cheaply “deep,” while going instead for something weirder and arguably superior.”—New York Times
From the author of the groundbreaking debut The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, which “took the poetry world by storm,” and the instant classic follow-up PAIN: The Board Game, which was initially banned, comes the eagerly anticipated mega collection Honey in the Tape Deck: New & Uncollected Poems. Over 20 years in the making, Honey offers the very best of Starkweather’s enthralling new work alongside a wide range of unpublished or out-of-print underground cult classics.
On full display in Honey in the Tape Deck is Starkweather’s trademark wit and his absurd and darkly comic illuminations of truth. Embodied with vivid images and metaphors, all set to irresistible rhythms, this collection of 17 sections (each its own universe) sprawls with flowing lyrics that are at once surreal, cinematic, and, ultimately, sublime.
Honey is simultaneously tender, revolutionary, dire, heartbreaking, critical, sensual, and thought-provoking. Its poems are chiseled to crystallized precision, full of near-constant surprise, and, most of all, fun. Both contemporary and timeless, Honey would be 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, of 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 their wild, generous dreams.
Author:
Sampson Starkweather
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.
