This collection expertly straddles emotional resonance and academic musings, while blending the aesthetics of poetry with painting and theoretical mathematics across works that employ painting as metaphor for existential examinations and ekphrastic poems. War of the Foxes, Siken’s second collection after a 10 year gap, is a minor masterpiece that is a feast for the mind and heart to untangle the philosophical quandaries, profuse self-doubt and abstract beauty that culminate in these breathtaking poems. If existential anxiety wrote poetry, I suspect it would read a lot like Richard Siken. ‘ I turned / the image over like a rock, but then the worms.’
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