Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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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. This powerful collection of poems is extravagant and erotic, confrontational and confused, bloody and brutal, ferocious and feral. It’s painful, but it’s a delicious pain, glorious in love and lust and in being alternately strong and vulnerable. In the foreword to Crush, competition judge Louise Glück wrote that the poems contained "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness", and that "Books of this kind dream big [.

Otherwise, though, the poems are so overblown (too many words going in too many directions) and drowning in imagery of bodies, knives, and death. 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. 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 opening poem, Scheherazade (the title references to the character from One Thousand and One Nights) intimates inevitability and is foreboding in its tone. I also thought his endings consistently flopped: almost half the poems end with some form of repetition (either direct or implied). He received two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Residency Fellowships, and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Still, some of the images he constructed were pretty clever, and they make good use of language in expressing perceived queer inadequacy. I guess for the most part I'm realizing that I maybe grew out of it before I had the chance to read it.

it's something that you need to be in the right emotional place for, to be present for feelings as vivid as these. 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. 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.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. 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. Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken's] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.

And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. What's left are the raw emotions of the actual experience, which is what great poetry is: distilling the massive events that make up a life until there's nothing left but the urgent parts, the ones that carry the meaning. His poems progress to a down tempo drum beat, and the skill in line break leaves the reader constantly moving forward, the combination forces us to digest and contemplate the words as they come, but never let up a moment for us to stop chewing.A poetry collection inconsolable of its particular homosexual aching and desire, Crush grinds words into a cup of caffeine-infused affection. Unless you are a brilliant, brilliant poet, I don't want to read a whole collection of your poems that are set in a forest or come out of a panic or pine endlessly after a lover. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame. Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway.