Siken spent fifteen years writing Crush, influenced by the 1991 death of his boyfriend. While Siken is devoted to emotions, he is also interested in the physical body and the damage both can do. In his book, Siken writes about panic without saying “panic” and writes about obsession without risking cliché sentimentality or becoming predictable. Danielle told me to read that poem and then go home and buy the book.Ĭrush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In trying to point me to poems that displayed different kinds of tension (dramatic, linguistic, as well as tension in form, in juxtaposition, in movement, etc.) she gave me a packet of poems that modeled these, as well as a list of exercises that might help me generate work that inherently contained “tension.” The first poem in the packet was Siken’s “ Planet of Love,” filed under “dramatic tension” section. While working on my MA thesis, a chapbook of poems, at the University of Cincinnati, one of my professors, Danielle Deulen, in reviewing my work, said that my poems lacked tension. Though at this point I had been studying poetry for years, this is the book that made me love poetry. This was the book that made me think I might want to read a collection of poems as much as I’d want to read a novel, something I’d never even imagined. Richard Siken’s Crush changed poetry for me after reading this book, poetry suddenly became something that was passionate, tender, and complicated, but also accessible. They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.In honor of Valentine’s Day this week, I want to celebrate a book of poems I’m in love with. She notes, "Books of this kind dream big. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him.
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.
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