'Every poem in Crush is every bit as immediate, engaging, and absorptive as the best films holds the reader rapt, making it almost impossible to look away from the beautiful and troubling scenes he sets. Crush is a vivid, fast-paced book that may be read as a single, powerful sequence.'- Antioch Review ' 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. Recommended for all collections.'- Library Journal This book will excite patrons and be long remembered. 'Siken’s debut collection derives its energy from the friction among bodies, selves, and lovers. 'Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.'- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)

'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 They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. In her introduction to the book, 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.

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. “Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope.”- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) “One of the best books of contemporary poetry.”-Victoria Chang, Huffington Post Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry-an erotic, powerful collection

Richard siken crush poem