To collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer The artist and his subject are in this way simultaneously allies and antagonists, necessary partners in the construction of the image even as they must constantly confront the gap between a frozen moment and a dynamic identity: The sitter always eludes the paint this failure becomes the true object of the painter’s interest and the true subject of every portrait. Though none of its poems are frantic or rushed, the projection of order in War is only ever aspirational. His speakers are alternately impatient, wry, didactic, tender, clarifying, qualifying, tentatively earnest, and veiled in their confessions. He has an unrivaled ear for the various tones of quarrel.

Handsome and you’re a fascist, make him ugly and Despite the more orderly stanzas and the pose of a tighter hand on the reins–and it’s only a pose, of course, Crush too was meticulously assembled-the voice is still distinctively Siken’s, fanged, droll, darkly self-critical: Where Crush’s lines splayed out toward the margins, War’s fall neatly into line, organized into tight stanzas and narrow paragraphs.īut it’s misleading to position War as a disavowal of Crush’s kinetic logic. This shift (from film to portrait, from movement to stillness) is visible in the poems’ form. Siken’s language in Crush was self-consciously cinematic–“Cameras are everywhere,” wrote Glück, “the means by which an instant can be replayed over and over”–and so a shift to the visual language of painting is a shift to suspension rather than projection through time. It’s hard not to read the new volume against the first, especially because the painter who narrates many of War’s poems so easily stands in for the poet himself. War of the Foxes is Siken’s first collection of poems since Crush. None of which diminishes my love and admiration, but I love and admire plenty of things that I do not quite enjoy. Masochistic, yes, but also sadistic: I feel punished by it, conscripted to witness and therefore participate in Siken’s abjection.

Rereading it now, Crush feels unrelenting. The poems are brilliantly associative their lines splatter jittery across the page. Crush is a dark, restless, romantic book, single-minded in its articulation of the perils and disappointments of love between boys. Its texture–its “profound wildness that is also completely intelligible,” as Louise Glück wrote in her foreword to the volume–retains for me the potency of a sense memory. If pressed, I could not name the boys or recite our favorite passages, but I feel certain that Richard Siken’s Crush (2005) was the book all of the gay aspiring poets at my college read and reread, dog-eared, and invoked reverently in workshops and on Facebook.

Crush richard siken review