Crush
2004
- poetry
- american poetry
- poetry (poetic works by one author)
- lgbt poetry
- lgbtq poetry
- lambda literary awards
- lambda literary award winner
- collection:thom_gunn_award=winner
The story
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."
What it’s like
Restless, fractured lines that tumble down the page in long, breathless stanzas, with repetition and recurring images (a bed, a hallway, a red room, a body in water) that circle back like a fever dream. The voice is confessional and intimate, at times almost whispered, at others shouting, so reading it feels like being pulled along by someone who cannot stop talking. Its mood is urgent and aching, a blend of longing, self-disgust, and yearning, with flashes of tenderness that break hard against violence and danger. Nights, sleepless hours, and long solitary sittings suit it best, especially with the lamp low and the rest of the house quiet. The intensity is high: violent imagery, sexual content, and frank depictions of obsession and self-destruction run throughout, though the poems are more emotionally harrowing than graphic. Readers drawn to queer poetry, to the raw immediacy of first-person confession, and to language that feels dangerous and alive will find this collection electric, while anyone wanting calm, gentle verse should look elsewhere.
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