War of the Foxes

by Richard Siken

Overview

"His territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse.'—The New York Times

"Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."—Huffington Post

Richard Siken's debut, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize, sold over 20,000 copies, and earned him a devoted fan-base. In this much-anticipated second book, Richard Siken seeks definite answers to indefinite questions: what it means to be called to make—whether it is a self, love, war, or art—and what it means to answer that call. In poems equal parts contradiction and clarity, logic and dream, Siken tells the modern world an unforgettable fable about itself.

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:	9781619321311
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	562,463
File size:	962 KB

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