My love of reading encompasses fiction, nonfiction, essays, short stories and a multitude of genres and styles. I’ve even found amusement from the back of potato chip bags with particularly pithy ad copy, but the one genre that I’ve always struggled to love is poetry. To me, poetry is that moony stuff I had to suffer through in English class, always secretly hoping we would move on to novels or Hawthorne short stories and forget about Emily Dickinson and her birds. It’s rare that I read poetry recreationally; I may sample the occasional e.e. cummings or Margaret Atwood offering, but beyond that the appeal of poetry remains a mystery. Still, Richard Siken is doing his best to enlighten me. I stumbled upon my first Siken poem during a bout of internet wandering. It was “Wishbone,” a searing and angry ode to the sensation of unrequited devotion. In it he writes: You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn [...]
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