Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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The Huffington Post's Victoria Chang praises the poet for writing with a "cinematic brilliance and urgency". [4] 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. It changed me, and I'm not even kidding or exaggerating. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. Words I was never able to find myself, but needed more deeply than I'd realised. I've read parts of this book separately and reading it whole now takes me to places I thought I left, a previous lover read to me a poem by him, I've read lines of the book once so many times that some days of mine were titled by some of these verses.

The stunningly intimate photograph on this anthology's cover is where my initial interest lay and I was not disappointed by the just as raw contents that lay underneath it. This powerful collection of poems is extravagant and erotic, confrontational and confused, bloody and brutal, ferocious and feral. Siken delivers something so unapologetic that it feels like his soul delivered up to the reader in the form of paper and ink. I have never in my life anticipated the arrival of a book more than I did with this. My entire body was aching for it. And then it arrived.

Still, some of the images he constructed were pretty clever, and they make good use of language in expressing perceived queer inadequacy. I just wish these were more frequent!!

Siken's debut collection derives its energy from the friction among bodies, selves, and lovers. . . . This book will excite patrons and be long remembered. Recommended for all collections.- Library Journal The collection of poems contemplate infatuation, intimacy, loss, and grief. It is said that Siken's main inspiration was the death of his boyfriend in the early 1990s. [2] The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.” I liked the first poems the most, but I'm not sure whether it's because I did like them or because I was still optimistic about the book. After a few poems you notice the repetition pretty early on. I figured it was a reoccurring theme type thing, which I usually grow fond of, but it kind of felt like saying the same thing over and over. After the first few poems it lost me until the second to last poem which I liked in a weird-dream-sequence kind of way, but even that dragged on just a little too long.how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple I think that's the most beautiful piece of poetry I've ever read. I won't convince you. Here's my fav poem. What the book doesn’t tell you directly is that Richard Siken was partially influenced by the death of his boyfriend. I don’t want to make any assumptions here about how that has influenced the content, but I will say that the poems read like a lover trying to move on from something that is, well, crushing. Moving on is not something you can just will yourself to do.

because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this This is not a book about Prometheus, but it may as well be. (We are playing with fire here, after all. At least, love can feel like a fire.) Every poem in this book is essentially the same. The poems are strong individually, but read together, they build something stronger. Images are repeated again and again with only slight variations (driving on the road, running out onto the road, lying in the road). The poems can’t help but to return to the same thing again. It’s painful, but it’s a delicious pain, glorious in love and lust and in being alternately strong and vulnerable.

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SIken's Crush, his first book which also won the Yale Young Poets' award in 2004, is one of he most complete works of poetry I've come across in years.

I'd seen this book quoted all over, and I really looked forward to reading it because of those quotes, which I quite liked, but those few that I'd read before even opening the book were almost the only quotes I liked after completing it. terrifically raw, dark, glimmering beautiful. i'm regretful that i'm not currently in a place where i can process such raw passion and anguish and aching (both aching as in longing and aching as in hurting). it's something that you need to be in the right emotional place for, to be present for feelings as vivid as these. i'll have to revisit this someday. It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terr­ible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.

This little poetry book is divided into three parts, the author at first doesn't tell you what is going on but later all the parts are related and is kind of a story. Mostly every chapter contain the word “kill”, “suicide”, and “hit” it was tiresome reading the same chapters over and over with the same words just in different scenarios, the person who speak and tells these stories is in an abusive relationship and want to escape so this person just create scenarios in their head and speak aloud for some kind of liberation. I only liked the first but after that every section describes how this abusive relationship started and grew. I am in love with it. That's the easiest way to put it. My copy is worn out from being opened, read in, then thrown onto the table or put carelessly down as I try to gather myself up from my messy emotional pile on the floor and try to deal with, well... myself. 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 It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,/green beautiful green./It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green." -Meanwhile will be marked in my reading annals as re-discovering my love of poetry. My favorite of the new poets I've discovered is Richard Siken. His first volume of poems Crush, was a revelation to me; Crush changed poetry for me.