It’s hard for me to write a review for a poetry book by the same author who wrote Crush, an astounding and heartbreaking collection that I’ve returned to countless times. The War of the Foxes is on a divergent road to Crush and it comes as no surprise that these collections are different thematically from one another. I found myself searching in this collection for that ache of the soul so present in Crush that made me an instant fan of Siken’s work. I would be hesitant to place The War of the Foxes on the same level as Crush, and in the same breath, I’ll also praise TWOTF for it’s sometimes haunting and self-implicating lines that are a hallmark of Siken’s work. Some endings to the poems in TWOTF did strike me as clunky, and I wish that they had been pushed a little further in their poignancy. 

I definitely anticipate returning to this collection after digesting these poems for awhile and seeing how my relationship to them changes.