Crush

The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collection

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

"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

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."

Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 04/11/2005
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.21lbs
Size: 7.46h x 5.66w x 0.25d
ISBN: 9780300107890


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/01/2005 pg. 134
Library Journal 04/15/2006 pg. 82

About the Author
Richard Siken lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is cofounder and editor of the literary magazine spork.