Category: Poetry Prize

Review: War of the Foxes

8/1/2016

Putting Down the Brush
Review: War of the Foxes

Mitchell Layton

Richard Siken
Poetry
Copper Canyon Press, pp.49
Cost: $17

War of the Foxes (2015) is the long awaited follow-up to Richard Siken’s Crush (2005), published ten years ago, which won the Yale Younger Poet’s prize. It is a brilliant work full of questions and unearthing, looking both inward and around, projecting his battles through art, poetry, and the characters within them.

Most of Siken’s poems seem to be self-reflecting, riddled with abstractions and rhetorical questions. He yearns to untie “the knot of the self,” as quoted from his poem, “Glue,” looking at his own writing, his own art, his own life and mentality. It is soul searching in its finest display of craft. Profound attempts to answer profound questions. Siken could be questioning his own existence and his own method of life. “Why live a life? Well, why are you asking?” The very process of writing seems to be the answer to his questions.

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Review: Scrap Iron

8/1/2015

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Small Town Displacement
Review: Scrap Iron

Carly Szabo

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr.
Poetry
The University of Utah Press, pp. 92
Cost: $11.80

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. dares his audience to pontificate the world and relationships around them in his stunning work of poetry Scrap Iron. Written with a narrative voice, these poems are less like traditional poetry and more like beautifully detailed, deeply personal stories that explore the complexities of familial relationships and the desire to be elsewhere. Broken into three parts, there is a clear beginning middle and end to this book of poetry that is lacking in other similar works. Rather than leaving the reader empty and unfulfilled, the carefully comprised structure of this book ends with the reader left in a state of deep thought and satisfaction.

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Review: War of the Foxes

Review: Scrap Iron

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