Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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SIken's Crush, his first book which also won the Yale Young Poets' award in 2004, is one of he most complete works of poetry I've come across in years. The stunningly intimate photograph on this anthology's cover is where my initial interest lay and I was not disappointed by the just as raw contents that lay underneath it. If there was one thing I could save from the fire, he said, the broken arms of the sycamore, the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard — your breath on my neck like a music that holds my hands down, kisses as they burn their way along my spine — or rain, our bodies wet, clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging nipple to groin — I’ll be right here. I'd seen this book quoted all over, and I really looked forward to reading it because of those quotes, which I quite liked, but those few that I'd read before even opening the book were almost the only quotes I liked after completing it.

It was selected as the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition [1] by Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. Siken is beyond talented with words, that much is clear, this entire collection is a work of pure art, something you rarely find these days. The desire to touch, the gesture of touching, becomes dangerous, damaging, after the hand, withheld for so long, finally makes an attempt at contact. Violence is also something that permeates the poetry of Crush, giving it a gritty and slightly desolate feel.

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. 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. This little poetry book is divided into three parts, the author at first doesn't tell you what is going on but later all the parts are related and is kind of a story.

Siken has, within Crush, created a world of love and death, of paranoia, where voices drift in and out, where the self questions its other aloud, causing disbelief in the fact of the world even as it builds around us into existence.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. 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.