Starkweather Dreams: Landscape with Figures

A poetry collection.

Christopher Conlon, author of poetry collections Gilbert and Garbo in Love, The Weeping Time, and Mary Falls and the novel Midnight on Mourn Street turns his attention to the short, violent lives of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. With a haunting depth and sensitivity, Conlon explores the possibilities that made human beings turn savage in the middle of America, and follows the doomed pair on a bloodthirsty journey made all the more tragic by its reality.

"Charles Raymond Starkweather lived a short, violent life — from his birth in November of 1938 to his death in the electric chair in June of 1959. Along with his equally lethal young girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate (she was just fourteen when they met in 1957), he shot and/or stabbed eleven victims to death in Nebraska and Wyoming. Christopher Conlon follows up his other masterful verse portraits with this stark — no pun intended — vision of inner torment and murder. In often savage, sometimes lyrical, and always jolting poetic images, Conlon word-paints a dark blood canvas which reveals the soul of one of history’s most notorious serial killers. Charlie Starkweather lives, loves, and death-dreams once again in these nightmare pages." - William F. Nolan