“This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.”—NPR.org
"Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."—Huffington Post
In reviewing Richard Siken''s first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that "his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse." In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.
"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."—Library Journal, starred review
"[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create."—Vanity Fair
"Siken’s stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art."—Booklist
“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.”—Publishers Weekly
"War of the
