Little Beast

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019

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Related Poems

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1962)

In “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath builds a poem around the allure of violence. Like Siken’s “Little Beast,” Plath’s “Daddy” reveals a fascination with destruction. “Every woman adores a Fascist,” quips Plath’s controversial speaker. Her speaker is titillated by her father’s Nazi past and the atrocities attached to it. Death fascinates Plath’s speaker. She tries to kill herself to return to her daddy. Later on, she brags about killing her father and her husband. It’s as if Plath’s speaker is the boy with the handgun in Siken’s poem.

“After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade” by Dennis Cooper (2000)

Dennis Cooper is a novelist and a poet. Like “Little Beast” and the other poems in Crush, Cooper’s works explore the violence and destruction of desire—particularly, gay desire. In “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade,” the speaker and his friends gaze at the football players as if they’re watching beautiful animals. They dream of one of the players approaching them and sinking his long teeth into their necks. Death doesn’t diminish desire in Cooper’s poem. A car hits and kills one of the football players, and the speaker says the dead body is “sexy.”

“Boot Theory” by Richard Siken

“Boot Theory” is another poem from Crush. Similar to “Little Beast,” Siken switches between banal and violent diction. The poem centers on a trite joke that starts with a man saying, “Take my wife—please.” Siken subverts the hackneyed routine and, after taking home the wife, takes the man. The man kicks the speaker, and the speaker swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. As with “Little Beast,” names are absent, and a traditional orientation is subverted.

“Mugging (I)” by Allen Ginsberg (1984)

Ginsberg’s poetry, including the (in)famous “Howl,” addresses themes of violence, sexual desire, trauma, and orientation, among many others. In this shorter poem, Ginsberg endures a mugging by a group of young men and infuses the violent act with both spiritual and sexual tones. By the end, after the young men flee, the speaker wishes that his “God Muggers” would have stayed with him a bit longer.

Further Literary Resources

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)

Published in 1956, James Baldwin’s erotic novel features many of the themes and ideas that “Little Beast” tackled almost 50 years later. Both works confront being gay and desire, as well as the primal underbelly of death and notions of time. The speaker and the speaker’s partner exist outside of history in “Little Beast.” In Baldwin’s novel, the two male characters united as “time flowed past indifferently” and “hours and days had no meaning.”

“Is the Rectum a Grave?” by Leo Bersani (1987)

Written in the middle of the AIDS crisis, Bersani deconstructs tropes about sex and being gay. Bersani’s conclusions connect to the themes of “Little Beast.” Bersani sees sex as a means to shatter suffocating notions of personhood and free the self from the confines of identity. Like Siken, Bersani connects sex, violence, death, and identity to create a narrative that transgresses cultural norms.

“Commonplace” interview with Richard Siken (2018)

For her podcast, Commonplace, the poet and teacher Rachel Zucker traveled to Tucson, Arizona, to interview Richard Siken in the offices of Spork Press. The interview produces quite a few revelations. Zucker is surprised that Siken was never a social worker. Siken also opens up about his inimical relationship with his father and why he sometimes intentionally misleads people about the facts of his life. Siken says he withholds names because they make the work less universal. As for biographical details, Siken labels them “boring,” “common,” and “everywhere.”

Listen to Poem

Argyle Dinosaur reads "Little Beast" by Richard Siken

A YouTuber with the username Argyle Dinosaur reads Richard Siken’s poem “Little Beast” aloud. After, she holds a disarming and accessible discussion about the work.