War of the Foxes
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4.9 • 21 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
Customer Reviews
Perspective Expanding
Honestly, I work as a clinical therapist and have been using 'War of the Foxes' as a bridge. Much of the themes throughout the book deal directly with struggle, the subjective experience of meaning, and finding humor within an absurd existence. This collection is on par with hanging out with a visionary mad man wanting to find a love that can only stem from acceptance.
Siken pulls no punches and goes straight for the jugular. Whether it's through revealing parts of himself or the reader, Siken flows with vulnerability. He asks himself and others the hard question:
"To supply the world with what?"