War of the Foxes

By Richard Siken

• Siken is a huge hit on the literary blogopshere and Tumblr.
• Much-anticipated second book, almost ten years after his widely-acclaimed Yale Younger first-book award winner, Crush
• Siken is loved and admired by the gay community
• Siken has a devoted following through his work at the literary magazine spork

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781619321311

Book preview

THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,

so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful

to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats

in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.

The man stands, the day shines. His insides and

his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line—

thick and rude and imaginary because there is

no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint

on paint. I have my body and you have yours.

Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.

When you bang on the wall you have to remember

you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead,

yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand

anything. They see the man but not the light,

they see the field but not the varnish. There is no

light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?

They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face

and I paint it out again. There is a question

I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?

LANDSCAPE WITH A BLUR OF CONQUERORS

To have a thought, there must be an object—

the field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick

with sunshine. There must be an object so land

a man there, solid on his feet, on solid ground, in

a field fully flooded, enough light to see him clearly,

the light on his skin and bouncing off his skin.

He’s easy to desire since there’s not much to him,

vague and smeary in his ochers, in his umbers,

burning in the open field. Forget about his insides,

his plumbing and his furnaces, put a thing in his hand

and be done with it. No one wants to know what’s

in his head. It should be enough. To make something

beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be.

The smear of his head—I paint it out, I paint it in

again. I ask it what it wants. I want to be a cornerstone,

says the head. Let’s kill something. Land a man in a

landscape and he’ll try to conquer it. Make him

handsome and you’re a fascist, make him ugly and

you’re saying nothing new. The conqueror suits up

and takes the field, his horse already painted in

beneath him. What do you do with a man like that?

While you are deciding, more men ride in. The hand

sings weapon. The mind says tool. The body swerves

in the service of the mind, which is evidence of

the mind but not actual proof. More conquerors.

They swarm the field and their painted flags unfurl.

Crown yourself with leaves and stake your claim

before something smears up the paint. I turned away

from darkness to see daylight, to see what would

happen. What happened? What does a man want?

Power. The men spread, the thought extends. I paint

them out,

Reviews for War of the Foxes

[ellegato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Unlike everyone else (lol) this was my first Siken book. I've read a few of his earlier poems ("You Are Jeff" for example) and I enjoyed them immensely; I just happened to come across this book before "Crush" so I suppose my review is from a fairly different perspective.

I enjoyed this very much. I loved the structure of this book, the way the poems built off one another, circled and edged around an idea, struggled with questions that echoed back in other poems. I loved the repetitive images of birds, painting, spies, the moon. I loved mostly how Siken plays with representation, how he links hunger, desire, memory, and blood with all that we want to portray, to believe, to understand. I liked the simplicity of the poems, the bare-bones words Siken uses. It felt appropriate to grapple with representation in pared-down vocabulary, trying to find the heart of it and never quite succeeding.

I guess if I'd read "Crush" first perhaps I'd have expected something different. But "War of the Foxes" has certainly made me want to read more Siken so I'd count that as a success!

[raignn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Certainly a different book than Crush, but ultimately that's what drew me in. We see Siken has grown and changed and moved on to new obsessions. He circles around painting in many of these and the collection more subtle but still moving. I found myself reading several of these out loud because I wanted to hear them again and again.

[Claire Gorman · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Some good nuggets, but I didn’t find the execution very effective or compelling.

[Anindita Sengupta · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Phenomenal. Brilliant, cinematic, startling juxtapositions. It’s fascinating to read and I will come back to it.

[Liana · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this collection is beautiful and heart wrenchingly bleak. it left me suffocating.

[detroitleprechaun · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Distinct among the poetry collections I have thus read. I do fear the description given in 'The Worm King's Lullaby' may be accurate: "esoteric and unfollowable, written with perfect penmanship and a total disregard for any reader."The writing style I can best describe as follows: acutely cryptic and abstract in regards to meaning, incredibly matter-of-fact in regards to sentence structure. Prose style and occasionally justified text fit snugly. Invariable usage of the present tense adds a lively dimension to an otherwise quiet collection. The painting theme works well when it is utilized, but it peters out for the most part toward the back half of the book, as does the appeal of the poetry. I also have never seen a competent writer utilize repetition to this extent.

[lethalmauve · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Siken's second poetry collection, War of the Foxes, is a much subdued, much quiet collection. Where Crush is mostly rough, obsessed, and eager to encapsulate the lover with its ravaging arms, War of the Foxes drinks up the lover through glances and stares from afar frequently with a brush and canvas at hand; the encapsulation happens every time, every chance art inspires and devastates. Often portrays the painter and their subject in myriad of spaces and touches, entwining bodies and bodies separated, each poem in this collection observes and loves. The palette is an iridescence of homosexual devotion, affection, and frustration. It tries to recognise its own self in the act of loving, even in the mere thought of a particular someone, and its unusual personification of birds as if to free itself through its flight as desire weighs it down in its mental battlefield. This yearns at a distance, that in itself is a kind of warfare. The result then is abstract ("What does this love amount to?", Siken asks), we are all unrecognisable in the state of loving and unloving; painting is a collaboration between the painter and their subject.When we paint a beloved, see the beloved, do we genuinely capture who they are or are our biases create and smudge them with our own perception? Do we love an ideal and an idol? When do we love what's real and what's really there?Siken absolutely resonates with the utmost struggle of immortalising the beloved through art but as is with Crush, somehow it can be stifling. A pleonasm of afflicting emotions and contradicting utterances coat some of the poems. Where there should be moments to breathe, take a break, put the brush down and return to the canvas much later on, this instead laboriously refines and alters the portraits again and again to its own dissatisfaction. Its want of perfection dangerous. Nonetheless I was very much moved by a lot of poems here compared to Crush, three of them even tugged a tear down my eyes and another two which I can't forget: Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light, Landscape with Black Coats in Snow, Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper, Three Proofs, and Dots Everywhere.Some excerpts I loved:"Color bleeds, so make it work for you.Gravity pulls, so make it work for you. Rubbingyour feet at night or clutching your stomach in themorning. It was illegible—no single line of sight,too many angles of approach, smoke in the distance.It made no sense. When you have nothing to say,set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless."— from Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede"I would like to say somethingabout grace and the brown corduroy thrift store coatI bought for eight-fifty when you told me mypaintings were empty. Never finish a war withoutstarting another. I've seen your true face: the backof your head. If you were walking away, keep walking."— from Birds Hover the Trampled Field"I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. Icalled it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty."— from The Field of Rooms and Halls"Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else."— from Detail of the Woods"What’s the difference between me and the world?Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t knowwhat to do with my love. Because it isn’t used tobeing loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening?Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hardto make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severelyand slept through all my appointments. I clawedmy way into the light but the light is just as scary.I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.Admirable? Not really. I hate my friends. And whenI hate my friends I’ve failed myself, failed to sharemy compassion."— from Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Siken continues, from Crush, his habit of obsessive repetition and variation of certain themes, different ones here: war, painting, the reasons (if any) to create painting, the boundaries of the body, violating those boundaries (cutting off one’s own head). Maybe that repetition/variation is what makes him so attractive to fan creators? I don’t know what identity he’s using to write BBC Sherlock fanfic, but I still like the rhythm of his poems. My favorite line: “I’ve seen your true face: the back/of your head.” Crush is more my favorite for its violent Americana—here Siken moves from individualized violence to the violence of warring armies: landscape strewn with dead bodies, landscape that swallows up any individual.