Review by Booklist Review
Siken's debut, Crush (2005), was a big hit, and his latest is a visceral, visual attack on the senses. In a collection as much about devastation as creation, the poet takes readers through a linguistic art gallery (Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors, Still Life with Skulls and Bacon). Siken occasionally stops to consider his subjects with hyperfocus, such as when Landscape with Several Small Fires gives way to Detail of the Fire. But his central concern is the enduring war between the artist and his art, which is most evident in the title poem. Through sharp, repeated images of birds, foxes, fruit, and fire, the speaker continues to find something to battle with through art (Trust me, I have things to say), though, in the end, he seems unconvinced of his goal. We all dream of the complete document, he sighs, the atlas of the idea . . . . What does all this love amount to? / Putting down the brush for the last time . Siken's stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art.--Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A decade after releasing his debut collection, Crush (winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and a Lambda Literary Award), to sweeping and enduring acclaim, Siken offers a streamlined volume in which careful meditations on the act of making lead to questions of being, knowing, and power. What remains the same is the shrewd manner in which the poems move and turn, with Siken manipulating a wide range of rhetorical gestures-snatches of speech, direct questions, aphorisms, and negations come into play in quick succession-but always in service of a poem's clear and focused aims. This inward, contemplative book is driven by inquiry from its opening lines: "The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects,/ so what's there to be faithful to?" Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken's sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency, as when he writes, "I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned/ into birds. I called it thinking." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. "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. VERDICT Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read.-Ellen Kaufman, New York (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
