This is a reasonable set of poems which seems to me to be largely about power relations, masculinity, and loneliness. Siken is a gay man, and that looms large over all of the poems. It’s a refreshing corrective to frequent discussions of masculinity within cross-gender contexts, but at this point LGBT perspectives are essentially mainstream.

At the end of the day, I just wasn’t that impressed. I picked this up because I heard that his War of the Foxes is a successor to this, and I heard the latter was really good and wanted to read it. I thought I should start here, although I don’t know that it’s necessary.