War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
Published 2015 · 49 pages · 13,475 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry
How hard is War of the Foxes to read?
War of the Foxes scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- A contemporary American poetry collection from Copper Canyon Press, written in English. Siken's poetry is known for plain diction, so the vocabulary is likely closer to Pedro Paramo's spare compression than to Eliot's allusive density.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Lyrics, fables and portraits suggest varied, fragmentary line-based syntax. Poems of this kind are less demanding than The Waste Land's broken syntax but ask more of the reader than plain prose does.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The collection reflects on art, truth and the self through mirrors and refraction. That puts it in more abstract territory than a concrete narrative, though fables and portraits ground it in images.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A short collection of about 13,000 words mixing forms: lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes. Each poem is compressed, but the book carries little factual or encyclopedic load.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Poems built from fables and reflections on the fallacies of seeking truth ask the reader to infer meaning rather than receive it. Library Journal calls the riffs slippery, which points to oblique address.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The mirrors and refraction in the book's own description work as organizing images. The fables and landscapes suggest symbols that carry meaning beyond the literal.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- The poems examine how people hunt for meaning in art and question the truth they find. That sets some gap between statement and intent, though the tone is described as brutal and tender rather than satirical.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- A collection that dramatizes the fallacies of searching for truth resists tidy conclusions. As poetry it has no plot to resolve, and slippery riffs suggest open endings.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Siken interleaves lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes in one book, a mixed-form arrangement. It is more varied than a single-mode collection but far from Flights' radical fragmentation.
How War of the Foxes is regarded
War of the Foxes holds a literary regard score of 45 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.