cover image War of the Foxes

War of the Foxes

Richard Siken. Copper Canyon (Consortium, dist.), $17 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-55659-477-9

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.” [em](Apr.) [/em]