War of the Foxes

"When you have nothing to say,/ set something on fire," writes Siken in his second collection (his first, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize in 2004). The fires in this book are more contained than in his first, and the writer does have something to say, mostly about art: "Grant me freedom from objects, says the painting. I will help you, says the paint." Individual canvases—his own and others'—are where many of these poems begin, with a satisfying concreteness: "the smear of his head—I paint it out, I paint it in/ again." But in Siken's disruptive aesthetic, reality escapes, and birdlike narratives take on their own agency: "The holes in this story are not lamps, they are not/ wheels." It seems, rather, that they are holes. And if it is not clear why one story should contain a fox and two bunnies, another "a deer called a stag," the emotion is clear: fear in the face of danger, pain and self-hatred on the familial battlefield. Ultimately, the poet cannot speak to his own questions of purpose. But he does offer a wonderful description of Picasso predicting how Gertrude Stein will eventually come to resemble his portrait of her.