Crush
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Richard Siken; Foreword by Louise Gluck
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Format: PaperPrice: $20.00
Hardcover
“One of the best books of contemporary poetry.”—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post
“Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope.”—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)
Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken’s Crush 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, 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.”
A selection of Readers' Subscription "The Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious [of poetry contests]."—Library Journal
"Crush embodies an impressive unity of sex, the currents of feeling that carry us helplessly, fleeting encounters that often promise physical transcendence but leave us unloved or emotionally drained. . . . Crush is a vivid, fast-paced book that may be read as a single, powerful sequence."—Antioch Review
"Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken's] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain."—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)
"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
"Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken's] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain."—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)
"Every poem in Crush is every bit as immediate, engaging, and absorptive as the best films; [Siken] holds the reader rapt, making it almost impossible to look away from the beautiful and troubling scenes he sets. . . . Siken's breathtaking debut possesses all the ingredients of poet Charles Harper Webb's formula for great poetry: wit, passion, and impropriety. Through his powerful use of the second person, Siken reaches out to you, the reader, pulls you into his picture show, makes you the reluctant star. By the end of the collection, you are left feeling implicated, participatory."—Kathleen Rooney, New Hampshire Review
"Siken's debut collection, 15 years in the making, hurls the reader into a world of nerve-wracked love–relationships haunted by obsession and futility–expressed with such eloquence as to make the pain of it strangely alluring. With sophisticated wordplay and provocative shifts between first and second person, Siken expresses a frustration with earthbound details and bodily confinement. He effectively juxtaposes holy wishes with mundane images–making them both seem beautiful by some strange lyrical alchemy–throwing love in with the sock drawer."—Nell Casey, poetryfoundation.org
"An explosive, frantic splash of language and imagery that depicts both tremendous tenderness and vivid violence between male lovers. Richard Siken writes a pulsing, rambling, surrealistic, and cinematic verse. . . . While the language and energy and pure sensational vision of this poetry might seep into your soul like the whiskey so often invoked in these pages, you will taste the salt of blood on your tongue after you finish reading Crush—and you will never look at love and the comfort it promises the same way again."—Maureen Picard Robins, Rain Taxi
Publication Date: October 22, 2019
