In this way, the relationship between a painter and a landscape is similar to the relationship between men and nature: as soon as we see it, we can’t help but change it, alter it, dominate it.

If the poems in Crush were engaged in the metaphysics of alienation, the poems in War of the Foxes are engaged in the metaphysics of creation, an aesthetic theory in which the boundaries of the human mind has drastic consequences for the natural world. As Siken writes in the poem “Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede,” “The mind fights / the body and the body fights the land.” And while the poems in War of the Foxes do sometimes read like entries from a painter’s notebook, they do, like the poems in Crush, refute the illusion of space, in this case the space between our bodies and the outside world. Gone is the savage sexuality of Crush, and in its place we find a painter alone in his studio in fact, the few references to lovers in this collection describe them asleep in the next room, as if these poems were written in the quiet hours after Crush. In War of the Foxes, Siken puts those frustrated appendages to use by picking up a paintbrush. One of the recurring images in Crush was that of the poet’s empty hands, hands rendered vestigial by all they were not allowed to touch. Negative space is silly.” Navigation of that space, both emotionally and physically, dominated the obsessive and hungry poems of Crush, which won the Yale Younger Poets competition in 2004.

In “The Way the Light Reflects,” Siken writes, “I have my body and you have yours. War of the Foxes, Richard Siken’s second collection of poems, begins where his debut collection Crush left off - the body. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

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