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
Siken himself has explained the sectioning of the Crush as “The first part is man against man, the second is man against God, the third is God, the director of the movie, in a helicopter trying to give advice and finding that no one is listening.”.The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collectionįinalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry In the third section (which begins with “Planet of Love” and ends with “Snow and Dirty Rain”), the speaker has been shot and is dying against his will. In the second section (which begins with “Visible World” and ends with “Saying Your Names”), death is understood as a reality. In the first section (which begins with “Scheherazade” and ends with “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”), death is viewed romantically and with longing. What holds is sheer art, despite the apparent abandon.”“ – from the blurb of Crush.Ĭrush is split into three sections, each of which aimed to move the reader through the speaker’s relationship with death. And the triumph of Crush is that it writhes and blazes while at the same time holding the reader utterly: ‘sustaining interest’ seems far to mild a term for this effect. The risk of obsessive material is that it may get boring, repetitious, predictable, shrill. In the dictionary, among the word’s many meanings, ‘to press between opposing bodies so as to break or injure to oppress to break, pound or grind.’ Or, as a noun, ‘extreme pressure.’ Out of this cauldron of destruction, its informal meaning: infatuation, the sweet fixation of girl on boy. As the distinguished poet and competition judge Louise Glück writes in the Foreword, "If panic is his ground note, Siken’s obsessive focus is a tyrant, the body. It is a powerful new collection of poems driven by panic and obsession.
“Richard Siken’s Crush is the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
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