It’s a method of investigating, of returning to the situation - or even the noun - to triangulate the location of the unsayable, or to change the lighting of the room, or the angle of approach, to see the same thing but with different shadows. RS: “Turning over and over” is exactly right. (The experience of reading this feels a bit like the perverse joy of picking at a scab - in the best way.) How does your writing process contribute to this obsessiveness?

The lineated poems are in the first-person, which was uncomfortable for me at first, since there was no longer a “you” to hide behind.īWR: What I notice most prominently in your work are its obsessions, both topically and linguistically, a turning over and over of lament and identity. The prose poems in the new book have characters doing actions, they have multiple speakers, so I used third-person there. I didn’t want to repeat that strategy, so I was left with first- and third-person: I and He. For instance, in Crush I used the second person extensively, in an attempt to make the reader complicit in the situations of the poems. There are dozens of craft choices a well. Rather than saying Why won’t you love me back? I’m saying War and death, leave my friends alone. The new poems are less desperate but more sad.

I think my voice is the same, but my concerns are larger. I’m older now and I can’t pretend that I’m still in such immediate crisis. Richard Siken: The poems in Crush were intense and interpersonal. (We at BWR are incredibly excited about this.) What have been the most prominent changes in your writing since Crush?

Black Warrior Review: Your upcoming publication War of the Foxes, slated for release in early 2015, is your first book-length work since 2005’s Crush.

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