The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, is driven by obsession and love—confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück hailed the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” Since its publication, Crush has become a modern classic. It is one of the books most often read by young poets, and it is frequently taught and assigned. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.
1100525397
Crush
The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, is driven by obsession and love—confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück hailed the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” Since its publication, Crush has become a modern classic. It is one of the books most often read by young poets, and it is frequently taught and assigned. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.
The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, is driven by obsession and love—confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück hailed the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” Since its publication, Crush has become a modern classic. It is one of the books most often read by young poets, and it is frequently taught and assigned. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of War of the Foxes and I Do Know Some Things. Siken lives in Tucson, AZ. Dana Levin is a poet and essayist who teaches at Maryville University and Bennington College. She lives in St. Louis, MO.
Read an Excerpt
Visible World
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists. You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streams straight to the bone, as if you were the small room closed in glass with every speck of dust illuminated. The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through
