Crush by Richard Siken, Louise Gluck (Foreword by), Louise Glueck (Foreword by)

From the Publisher

Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.

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.”

Library Journal

Not every poet launches his career by winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and not every Yale Younger Poet makes the impression Siken has made (he got a National Book Critics Circle nomination, for instance). Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, his verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain: "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake/ and dress them in warm clothes again./ How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running/ Until they forget that they are horses." (LJ 6/1/05) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0300107897
  
• ISBN-13: 9780300107890
• Format: Textbook Paperback, 80pp
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Pub. Date: March 2005
• Edition Number: 1
• Sales Rank: 70,421
• Series: Yale Series of Younger Poets

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Visible World

Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow


flat on the wall.

The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,


the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light


pummeling you in a stream of fists.

You raised your hand to your face as if


to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streams straight to the bone,

as if you were the small room closed in glass


with every speck of dust illuminated.

The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light


from passing through