Richard Siken writes a pulsing, rambling, surrealistic, and cinematic verse. "An explosive, frantic splash of language and imagery that depicts both tremendous tenderness and vivid violence between male lovers. 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, With sophisticated wordplay and provocative shifts between first and second person, Siken expresses a frustration with earthbound details and bodily confinement. "Siken's debut collection, fifteen 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. A vivid, fast-paced book that may be read as a single, powerful sequence."- Antioch Review " 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. "Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain."- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) This is a book about thrashing around in the great big world, being messy, being alive.”-Elizabeth A. The poems aren’t comforting, but they’re invigorating. The poems are vivid, heaving things, stuffed with obsession and surprises. "One book I keep returning to is Richard Siken’s Crush.
They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück 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. 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 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
The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collectionįinalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
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