Name: War of the Foxes
Rating: 4.078313253012048 (83 reviews)
ISBN: 9781556594779

Richard Siken

Best-selling poet and painter Richard Siken uses strong, bold strokes to reveal a world abstract, concrete, and exquisitely complex.

War of the Foxes

from “landscape with a blur of conquerors”

sage lynn

The body swerves / in the service of the mind, which is evidence of / the mind but not actual proof. 

from "landscape with fruit rot and millipede"

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be / alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.

Take a body, dump it, drive. Take a body, maybe / your own, and dump it gently. All your dead, / unfinished selves and dump them gently. Take only / what you need. The machine of the world--if you / don't grab on, you begin to tremble. And if you do / grab on, then everything trembles.

Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative, but it isn't a bird, it's a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn't looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn't there, with a song in its throat that you don't want to hear but you paint anyway.

kemi

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. 

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, so what’s there to be faithful to? / There is no light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?

Why take more than we need? Because we can. / You’d break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells. / 

The mind fights the body and the body fights the land. It wants our bodies, the landscape 

, and everyone runs the risk of being swallowed up. / We do not walk through a passive landscape. The paint dries eventually. The bodies decompose eventually.

Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it—living in the worst parts, ruining myself. / The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

A man had two birds in his head. / and the birds would sing all day never stopping. / 

You will die in your sleep and leave everything unfinished. / I had obligations: hope, but hope negates the experience. / I owe myself nothing. / All these things and what to do with them. / We carve up the world all the time.

I like dead things, they cannot hurt me. / My body is a graveyard, you’re welcome. 

People like to think war means something.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other. / We know who our enemies are. / 

You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to God. You can, but it does no good. Every spy knows this. Some say God is where we put our sorrow. God says, 

Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?

If you don’t believe in God, then who are you talking to?

Was I discovered or invented? / Measure yourself against the truth and not the other way around. / Perfect and completely dead.

Hook and bait, polestar and checkmate, I am your arrival, there is no refusal, we are here, you see, together, we are already here.

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday.

I’ll live alone or in between. This is the testimony of the deer: solitude, the long corridors, love from a distance.

overall i liked the collection but towards the end it started to lose me

made me internally screaming because i didn’t knew richard siken know me that well. 

self-portrait against red wallpaper and glue made me internally screaming because i didn’t knew richard siken know me that well. 

charisa

I feel like this might be a 5. I need to think about it some more. I really liked some of these and didn’t understand others bc poetry is hard!!!! But Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper read like a gut punch LOL 

Also, loved this:

“Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness
of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves
snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by
each other’s knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow.
I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story.
We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.”

"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.

the thoughtful, analytical voice in this book is different to 

, more polished maybe, but just as impressive; at certain points i had to pause to put my hand on my heart and squeal a bit over how good the poems were. 

 is literally the peak of all literature ever guys

the thoughtful, analytical voice in this book is different to crush, more polished maybe, but just as impressive; at certain points i had to pause to put my hand on my heart and squeal a bit over how good the poems were. the worm king's lullaby is literally the peak of all literature ever guys

“What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.”

Eliza Gonzalez

if you have one apples and i take away one apples you have, zero apples and a sadness

here's another problem: if i have one war of the foxes and you take away all the magic of crush, i have zero interest and a sadness.

i wanted to love this book so much. when crush came out, i was obsessed with it, and i knew then that siken would be my favorite contemporary poet. if i had gotten my hands on war of the foxes first, i wouldn't have even bothered reading crush. these almost seem as if written by two different people. there is definitely (obviously) siken in this book, but gone are the poems that made me feel things and situations i could relate to, or at least empathize with. if you're really unto winding, vividly worded poetry about painting, you'll probably like this, but i could not maintain my interest at all and i'm not ashamed to admit i just didn't get a lot of the poems.

still crossing my fingers to love whatever book he comes out with next.

Aleena Korell

Full disclosure: I'm not a huge poetry fan. Richard Siken's Crush was the first book of poetry I've loved enough to read all the way through. Siken's follow-up to Crush with War of the Foxes is very different-- which is fair enough. No one wants to or should be put in a box to replicate what they've done before.
But equally as fairly enough, it doesn't resonate with me in the same way. The tone is entirely different, quieter and more subdued. It feels to me like one long poem split into chapters and sections rather than a collection of poems, and that seems intentional with lines and themes threading through the entire book. That theme and those threads just didn't seem to capture me in the same way-- I'm sure there are plenty of others who will love it.
My favorite two poems were the titular War of the Foxes, and The Museum-- incidentally the two that seemed to stick out most from the main tone and theme with word choice and subject. 
At any rate, I'll always read Siken. Hopefully we get more from him someday.

zilver 

3.5-4

the top two reviews of this book i think put a lot of my thoughts into words already so thank you for that, reviewers.

war of the foxes is definitely less quotable and less personal than crush. i think that’s the main reason for taking away some stars, that the thing that drew me (and, i think, many others) to crush is how personal and raw it was, how it touched me to my core with its beauty and its pain. war of the foxes is more distant and i missed the closeness i remembered from crush. but i think it’d do me good to reread this book in a little while, so i can see it as its separate entity, which is what it deserves. i have to remind myself that there were over 10 years between the publishing of crush and the publishing of war of the foxes - richard siken has clearly grown and developed himself and his poetry and his scope. 

favourites: landscape with a blur of conquerors; birds hover the trampled field; landscape with several small fires; war of the foxes; ghost, zero, suitcase, and the moon, lovesong of the square root of negative one, self-portrait against red wallpaper

War of the Foxes

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