![]() Siken asks, “What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. While some characters come in the form of animals and could represent nature, life, beauty, etc., others, like the ghost, come as a representation of mortality or pain. ![]() Later he writes, “Close the blinds and kill the birds” in his poem “Self-Portrait against Red Wallpaper.” Where the birds once represented beauty and freedom, that freedom is surrendered and the birds find their lethal end. But Siken asks, “Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all?” These once beautiful birds are now questionably meaningless. Still, much of the poems focus on these characters, especially the birds.Īt first, the birds are described as something beautiful, something worthy of being painted and treasured. The repetition makes the poems seem more cohesive. The poems seem to collide and adhere to each other, all the while giving a bigger meaning to each other and the work as a whole. They take new forms with each poem, possibly related to his art or his emotion behind the art, but carry on a sort of loose narrative through the book. Many of the characters in his poems are animals. In this process, Siken creates several repeating characters in War of the Foxes: the birds, the fisherman and his son, the ghost, worms, and others which come as an aid to answer to Siken’s questions, or possibly representations of the questions themselves. ![]()
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