' Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. I carry his words with me everywhere, both in the shape of his actual book, but also in who I am. I'll never stop reading this book, and that's the great thing with poetry, analyzing, understanding and interpreting and simply feeling it, is a never-ending process. Words I was never able to find myself, but needed more deeply than I'd realised. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. It changed me, and I'm not even kidding or exaggerating. This book taught me something monumental about myself. I've read many books, some of them have taught me about the world, about people, about feelings or ideas.

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. Every poem has meaning, and soul and something deeply terrifying about it. Every line is powerful, it's got secrets. Siken is beyond talented with words, that much is clear, this entire collection is a work of pure art, something you rarely find these days. With a start like this, and with expectations as high as mine, you'd think the book would come up short. I have never in my life anticipated the arrival of a book more than I did with this. Dozens of times, until I realised it would never be enough, so I ordered his book. So I read it and re-read it again and again. That my mind kept circling back to his words. The next day I was painfully aware I couldn't leave it behind. I read Richard Siken's poem 'Wishbone' on the internet. They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.Not from the absence of violence, but despite 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 Announcing the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, North America's oldest annual literary prize.

Crush by Richard Siken