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 the 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.
About the Author: Growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota, J. N. Habiger had every opportunity to live the expected life set out before him. He worked 12-hour factory shifts, laid roofing in the mid-west summer heat, and went home to a wife he married at 20. But he was restless. His wife was an equal in her ambition and resentment for their expected life. Together they fled Minnesota and found themselves in Seattle - a place they both came to greatly love until the natural consequences of a human life pulled them apart. J. became disillusioned by the city and once again began looking for reprieve. This time he found himself returning to the rural life. This time he was alone. J. found himself in a cabin on the Kitsap Peninsula splitting wood and feeding a wood stove, gardening, and limbing trees. Isolated, he again grew unsettled. The quiet creeped in. During his three years in the cabin, J. came to shed the inner rejection he had acquired from small-town America and finally came out as a gay man. Learning to live his truth fully, with a greater sense of self, he confidently moved back to the city. But Seattle was indifferent to his existential progress. With bars on his single window, J. lived in a rent-controlled apartment behind a fast food joint where he befriended disabled veterans, strippers, addicts, and survivors of abuse. Many of them struggling with mental illness. It was here where J. began writing Sam. Seven years later, J. returned to Minnesota where his story began. He currently lives a better, revised version of his original story with his partner, Jeffery. Both live in Minneapolis. Sam is J.'s first published work.