Crush

by Richard Siken, Louise Glück (Foreword by)

Overview

The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collection 

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

"Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry."—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300107890
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/11/2005
Series:	Yale Series of Younger Poets
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	13,691
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 7.54(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Richard Siken lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is cofounder and editor of the literary magazine spork.

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

Editorial Reviews

One book I keep returning to is Richard Siken’s Crush. . . . The poems are vivid, heaving things, stuffed with obsession and surprises. . . . The poems aren’t comforting, but they’re invigorating. This is a book about thrashing around in the great big world, being messy, being alive.”—Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times Book Review

“Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry.”—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

“Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken’s] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.”—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)

“Crush embodies an impressive unity of sex, the currents of feeling that carry us helplessly, fleeting encounters that often promise physical transcendence but leave us unloved or emotionally drained. . . . Crush is a vivid, fast-paced book that may be read as a single, powerful sequence.”—Antioch Review


“Every poem in Crush is every bit as immediate, engaging, and absorptive as the best films; [Siken] holds the reader rapt, making it almost impossible to look away from the beautiful and troubling scenes he sets. . . . Siken’s breathtaking debut possesses all the ingredients of poet Charles Harper Webb’s formula for great poetry: wit, passion, and impropriety. Through his powerful use of the second person, Siken reaches out to you, the reader, pulls you into his picture show, makes you the reluctant star. By the end of the collection, you are left feeling implicated, participatory.”—Kathleen Rooney, New Hampshire Review

“Siken’s debut collection, 15 years in the making, hurls the reader into a world of nerve-wracked love—relationships haunted by obsession and futility expressed with such eloquence as to make the pain of it strangely alluring. With sophisticated wordplay and provocative shifts between first and second person, Siken expresses a frustration with earthbound details and bodily confinement. He effectively juxtaposes holy wishes with mundane images—making them both seem beautiful by some strange lyrical alchemy—throwing love in with the sock drawer.”—Nell Casey, poetryfoundation.org

“An explosive, frantic splash of language and imagery that depicts both tremendous tenderness and vivid violence between male lovers. Richard Siken writes a pulsing, rambling, surrealistic, and cinematic verse. . . . While the language and energy and pure sensational vision of this poetry might seep into your soul like the whiskey so often invoked in these pages, you will taste the salt of blood on your tongue after you finish reading Crush—and you will never look at love and the comfort it promises the same way again.”—Maureen Picard Robins, Rain Taxi

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

Winner of the 2005 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, sponsored by The Publishing Triangle

“Crush is a wondrous, brilliant book. Richard Siken’s poetry is daring in its construction, graceful yet startling in its beauty, and complicit with emotions and states of mind that would have remained unintelligible without him.”—Dennis Cooper

From the Publisher

"Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry."—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

Huffington Post - Victoria Chang

Not every poet launches his career by winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and not every Yale Younger Poet makes the impression Siken has made (he got a National Book Critics Circle nomination, for instance). Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, his verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain: "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake/ and dress them in warm clothes again./ How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running/ Until they forget that they are horses." (LJ 6/1/05) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal