Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review and Forklift, Ohio, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000 and Legitimate Dangers.

Still, some of the images he constructed were pretty clever, and they make good use of language in expressing perceived queer inadequacy. it's something that you need to be in the right emotional place for, to be present for feelings as vivid as these.You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.

The repetition of pacing and break builds on the down tempo into a culminating panic under the weight of body and the gravity of obsessive love.Siken, the winner of the 2004 Yale Series, is clearly a capable poet, and there were a few moments in this collection that were beautiful and lucid. Unless you are a brilliant, brilliant poet, I don't want to read a whole collection of your poems that are set in a forest or come out of a panic or pine endlessly after a lover. It's Uncle Jeff, who isn't really your uncle, but you can't talk right now, one of the Jeffs has put his tongue in your mouth. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.

Bullets, movie-like violence, car rides, stitches and gritty motel rooms form recurring themes in this bundle. I am not a poetry fan so some parts at the beginning cracked me up and I tried to find some sense in them and I failed. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising.

Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. If you are a GR friend of mine, I have probably already sent you a poem (or 2, or 3) from this book as I've taken my time to read through it. 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's poems are punk rock anthems, old country ballads, 60's B-movies, pulp novels, tin pail lunch boxes stuffed with old polaroids and love letters. 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.I liked the first poems the most, but I'm not sure whether it's because I did like them or because I was still optimistic about the book.