A review by kaymax
War of the Foxes by Richard Siken

4.0

I don't read enough poetry to know how I want to rate this, or to review this without sounding either pretentious or stupid. There were several passages that really did make me feel like I couldn't understand what he was trying to say, and then others that made me feel seen like an animal, wild and scared, caught in headlights.

In the poem Three Proofs, Siken says, If you don't believe in God or Fate you must still believe in narrative., which is the closest I'll ever come to true belief, so that resonated heavily. Don't get me started on the human nature of storytelling and how we've been doing it since the dawn of time, because I'm so, so, so passionate about storytelling in every form.

I think Siken is my favorite poet, by virtue of having read his work the most (loose poems, not yet whole collections until now) and resonated with so many specific lines. Reading a whole collection is different: seeing the recurring themes, the repeated phrases and comparing their paragraphs and additions. He writes very cool sentences. It helps that he is gay, and whenever his poems turn explicitly towards that, I find myself between the lines.