And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. I can tell already you think I'm the dragon, that would be so like me, but I'm not. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. His second book, War of the Foxes, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2015.Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed OutĮvery morning the maple leaves. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Foundation residencies, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review and Forklift, Ohio, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000 and Legitimate Dangers. Richard Siken’s poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other. Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word. What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think. People like to think war means something. Everyone wants a battlefield.Īccidents never happen when the room is empty.Įveryone understands this.

Siken describes the poem as “a sideways take on trauma: continued and engaged trauma, rather than hindsight.”Ī man with a bandage is in the middle of something.Įveryone understands this. “Detail of the Fire” will be included in Siken’s forthcoming collection War of Foxes. We’re delighted to feature in this issue on trauma a single poem by the award-winning poet Richard Siken, whose first collection of poems Crush is an obsessive exploration of the subject.

Richard siken new book