War of the Foxes

by Richard Siken

Overview

“This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.”—NPR.org

In reviewing Richard Siken's first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that "his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse." In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.

* "Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read."—Library Journal, starred review

"[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create."—Vanity Fair

"Siken’s stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art."—Booklist

“Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken’s sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency.”—Publishers Weekly

"War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken’s first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases—the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion."—The Rumpus

The Museum

Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.
He saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.
This is where everything changed . . .

Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556594779
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/28/2015
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	37,608
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Richard Siken: Richard Siken's first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in 2004, and became a poetry best-seller. He co-founded and currently edits the magazine spork and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Table of Contents

The Way the Light Reflects 3

Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors 4

Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede 6

Birds Hover the Trampled Field 8

Detail of the Hayneld 9

The Language of the Birds 10

Still Life with Skulls and Bacon 13

Landscape with Several Small Fires 14

Detail of the Fire 15

War of the Foxes 16

Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light 22

Three Proofs 24

Ghost, Zero, Suitcase, and the Moon 27

Logic 29

Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative 30

The Field of Rooms and Halls 31

The Mystery of the Pears 33

Dots Everywhere 34

The Museum 35

The Stag and the Quiver 36

Detail of the Woods 38

Landscape with Black Coats in Snow 39

Self-Portrait against Red Wallpaper 40

Glue 41

Turpentine 43

The Story of the Moon 44

The Worm King's Lullaby 45

The Painting That Includes All Painting 47

About the Author 49

Editorial Reviews

01/19/2015
A decade after releasing his debut collection, Crush (winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and a Lambda Literary Award), to sweeping and enduring acclaim, Siken offers a streamlined volume in which careful meditations on the act of making lead to questions of being, knowing, and power. What remains the same is the shrewd manner in which the poems move and turn, with Siken manipulating a wide range of rhetorical gestures—snatches of speech, direct questions, aphorisms, and negations come into play in quick succession—but always in service of a poem’s clear and focused aims. This inward, contemplative book is driven by inquiry from its opening lines: “The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,/ so what’s there to be faithful to?” Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken’s sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency, as when he writes, “I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned/ into birds. I called it thinking.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/15/2015
"When you have nothing to say,/ set something on fire," writes Siken in his second collection (his first, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize in 2004). The fires in this book are more contained than in his first, and the writer does have something to say, mostly about art: "Grant me freedom from objects, says the painting. I will help you, says the paint." Individual canvases—his own and others'—are where many of these poems begin, with a satisfying concreteness: "the smear of his head—I paint it out, I paint it in/ again." But in Siken's disruptive aesthetic, reality escapes, and birdlike narratives take on their own agency: "The holes in this story are not lamps, they are not/ wheels." It seems, rather, that they are holes. And if it is not clear why one story should contain a fox and two bunnies, another "a deer called a stag," the emotion is clear: fear in the face of danger, pain and self-hatred on the familial battlefield. Ultimately, the poet cannot speak to his own questions of purpose. But he does offer a wonderful description of Picasso predicting how Gertrude Stein will eventually come to resemble his portrait of her. VERDICT Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read.—Ellen Kaufman, New York

Library Journal