SAM: A Mundane Love Affair Between Two Men
J.N. Habiger
“Habiger’s spare and moving poem illuminates that wordless experience we humans endlessly try to explain: the act of being in love.” - Ina Russell, editor of Jeb and Dash, A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945
“Reminiscent of the clear and provocative poetry of Richard Brautigan, SAM leaps across the page and explores the world of a love affair and language in its dreamy, nearly imagistic visions…” - Douglas Cole, author of The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God
“Habiger has managed to write something that is both distant and intimate, fragile yet consistent.” - Mike Corrao, author of Man, Oh Man!
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In an apartment with bars and a view of the backside of a fast food joint, Sam was written as an exploration of the inner tension between the common and the unusual.
Within the hyperbolic depiction of a modern relationship between "a defect of the city" and a "sparrow who suffered simplicity of heart," the two men followed in this book unfold within a classic, yet tragic, love story.
In a series of 125 poems, Sam is revealed through a lens of an invisible narrator and is written in such a way that the reader has access to the inner states of the two men throughout its entirety.
Advance Praise for SAM:
“Habiger’s spare and moving poem illuminates that wordless experience we humans endlessly try to explain: the act of being in love.”
- Ina Russell, editor of Jeb and Dash, A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945
“J.N. Habiger’s SAM: A Mundane Love Affair Between Two Men, from the up and coming new press 11:11, is as much a love affair between two human beings as it is a love affair of language. Reminiscent of the clear and provocative poetry of Richard Brautigan, SAM leaps across the page and explores the world of a love affair and language in its dreamy, nearly imagistic visions of, say, an 'Attic of stars tiptoeing through his head,’ so that when we reach a passage like, ‘They had then/realized that/something more/was/being said,’ we know this to be true of the poetry as well. And so we travel through the mindscape of memory and imagination snaking down the page, as ‘words/with meaning lost/ their light…’ and learn ‘to understand/a certain sort/of language.’ And we come to know that through poetry, ‘wind/makes/music/ through/these/branches.’ And like the poetic language struggling to lift us out of the ‘Mundane,’ so are the lovers in SAM ‘Men/of resentment/in this world/of things.’ Transcendence in love, transcendence in language, ultimately, as the epigraph from Camus suggests, leads us to ‘allow/the day/to simply/happen.’ And love of another, love of language means ‘The city hasn’t/ made me hard.’ To love, to write, to create ‘a line with a word,’ and the ‘hopeful isolation/of a message/being sent,’ these are the rebellions that make the mundane sacred.”
- Douglas Cole, author of Bali Poems and Western Dream
"SAM: A Mundane Love Affair Between Two Men lives outside of time and space, in universes made from single rooms, or streets that materialize for the sake of their being there. Habiger has managed to write something that is both distant and intimate, fragile yet consistent."
- Mike Corrao, author of Man, Oh Man!
ISBN: 978-1-948687-01-0 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-948687-00-3 (paperback)