“One of the things about Siken’s previous collection, Crush, that I really liked was that the language was fairly plain. The concepts were big, things were used in an unusual way, but even when things got abstract, the language was concrete enough to pull me through.
It was kind of the opposite of this book. This book looks pretty normal in its formatting, where Crush was all over the place, but Crush was more plain in its language where this was more, well, poetic.
Poetry is super subjective, and you’ll probably feel differently than I did. I just felt, reading this book, like I didn’t quite “get” it, which is a big turnoff for me, and if you think that’s a standard feature of poetry and that all poetry is all that way, please see me in the comments.”