We Go Seasonal

“Robert Siek’s Manhattan is a city in distress, one that resembles, at times, a zombie apocalypse: ‘a herd / of walking dead crowding you, / mouths open and moaning, two step on your toes.’  ‘Does anyone ever get used to this?’ he asks. Siek loads his poems with the nightmarish grittiness of urban life. His lines expand, stretch to the limit, until it feels like they’re going to split at the seams and it’s all going to spill out, a blood-and-guts mess. So full are these poems of ‘everything / on the menu.’ And full also of Siek’s unique powers of observation, his hallucinatory free association, his twisted wit, and his refreshingly subversive sensibility.”

—David Trinidad

“Robert Siek’s poetry is murderously funny, utterly unexpected, twisted and Baudelaireishly, simultaneously, grotesque and gorgeous. Most urgently, with this uncanny new collection, Siek has opened a new space for and within queer discourse that transcends received polemics and too-familiar auto-cosmogonies. He does so by telling—beautifully, artfully—stories: monstrously observant stories about love and family, about sex and memory. And, most notably, he tells us, like and uniquely unlike Frank (and Neely for that matter) O’Hara, about the enormity of the everyday. The poet recounts stories not on message but messaging what it is to be absolutely alive in a filthy, sublime city: in New York, the legendary site of his brilliant sorcery.”

—Lynn Crosbie