Richard Siken’s ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out‘ is a sprawling, emotional, and devastating poem that deserves repeated readings and deep reflection.
Originally published in Crush (2005), Siken’s award-winning debut collection, the poem has steadily gained a cult following for its searing honesty and its refusal to separate desire from destruction. ‘Litany’ reads like a fever dream stitched together from myth, memory, and confession—a narrative that collapses even as it’s being built.
At its most literal, the poem documents a fraught relationship—the aftermath of love that couldn’t hold, or maybe never fully arrived. But this is no traditional breakup poem. Instead, Siken drags readers through a chaotic series of shifting roles: the speaker alternates between hero, villain, dragon, and princess, reshaping the narrative as he goes. “For a while I thought I was the dragon,” he admits. “And for a while, I thought I was / the princess.” There’s no safe position in this story. Love is an endless role reversal—first the adored, then the abandoned, then the aggressor. Gender becomes costume. Desire becomes battlefield. If award-winning American poet Claudia Rankine’s speakers struggle under racial weight, Siken’s struggle under emotional catastrophe, trying to identify themselves while being dissolved by intimacy. What emerges is not a resolution, but an emotional palimpsest: stories rewritten, roles reversed, pain re-experienced. There is a reason there is a running thread of apology in ‘Litany’, but it’s not the clean kind. These apologies arrive sharp-edged, half-joking, theatrical. They weaponize guilt and protect the speaker from true vulnerability. There’s a performance here, and the speaker knows it.
There are also rooms in this poem. Many. A stairwell, a bathroom, a window seat. All slightly off-kilter. Bathed in unnatural light. Bodies distorted, limbs far away. These are Rankine-esque spaces, where ordinary life becomes evidence. A woman in an airport bathroom lit by pharmacy fluorescents. A man crying on a train. A window that doesn’t open. These are the rooms where feelings happen. Where speech fails. “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not / what we sought, so do it over, give me another version.” Spanish poet and professor Antonio Machado would call this a haunted house. Rankine would call it systemic. Vietnamese-American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong might call it holy. Siken just calls it what it is: a ruin. “Build me another and call it Jerusalem,” he writes. A love not worth returning to, and yet we do. A home that was never safe, and yet we miss it. But memory is not static in this poem. It’s interactive. The speaker edits as he remembers. “Crossed out,” he writes, over and over. Like a redacted file. Like a half-erased diary. The line between erasure and revision becomes blurry. The act of remembering becomes its own form of artifice.
“Inside your head the sound of glass, / a car crash sound…” This poem is saturated in sound as memory trigger—not a Proustian madeleine but the reverse: trauma that snaps you awake. The echoes of bad parties, stairwell fights, parking lot arguments, replayed over and over. Siken is not building a poem. He’s reconstructing a black box from a downed plane. He’s listening to the final transmission. Throughout the full poem, Siken plays with language in ways that blur the line between truth and invention. Phrases repeat or contradict each other. Fantastical images are grounded in banality: deer in a clearing, airport bathrooms, foil packets of peanuts. One moment we’re in a castle, the next we’re under fluorescent lighting, staring into a mirror. These juxtapositions highlight a central tension of the poem: the grand scale of love versus the small, awkward facts of reality.
So why do we read it? In its final stanzas, the poem attempts an emotional reckoning. “Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently / we have had our difficulties,” the speaker writes. It’s a quietly devastating moment, where the poem briefly softens its edge, offering not closure but a table set for healing—even if the guest never arrives. We read poems like this not because they fix us, but because they tell the truth when no one else will. Because not every love is redemptive. Because some people leave, and some people are pushed away, and often it’s the same person doing both. Because there’s a version of each of us that we cannot forgive. Because some stories need to be told again, and again, and again. Even if it doesn’t work. Even if it hurts. But he writes it anyway. And we read it. And maybe that’s the forgiveness.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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