Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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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 don't even have a name for. Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again." You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. 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 don’t even have a name for."

Ugh why does everyone love this book? 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. Otherwise, though, the poems are so overblown (too many words going in too many directions) and drowning in imagery of bodies, knives, and death. Oh, and SO much cheesy, disembodied dialogue. it’s fitting that this book is called crush with how it crushes you and then you’re left lying on your bed at 3am wondering who you were before you knew these words. You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers/by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing." -Road Music I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”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. Still, some of the images he constructed were pretty clever, and they make good use of language in expressing perceived queer inadequacy. I just wish these were more frequent!! How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. 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. This powerful collection of poems is extravagant and erotic, confrontational and confused, bloody and brutal, ferocious and feral. Siken delivers something so unapologetic that it feels like his soul delivered up to the reader in the form of paper and ink. I have never in my life anticipated the arrival of a book more than I did with this. My entire body was aching for it. And then it arrived.

I can’t NOT give Siken some credit, as this book was published in 2005 and I’m convinced it must have had some sort of impact or influence on the contemporary poets I regularly enjoy reading (Crispin Best, Sam Riviere and even Richard Scott kept coming to mind, for instance). And then, I don’t like treating contemporary poems as tiny puzzles asking to be made sense of. In fact, I normally avoid trying to grasp the meaning behind every single line – “a good poem understands itself”, as Emily Berry put it in an interview for Chicago Review of Books. Besides, with contemporary poetry, I’m trying my best to enjoy the ride and genuinely have a good time. 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 This is not a book about Prometheus, but it may as well be. (We are playing with fire here, after all. At least, love can feel like a fire.) Every poem in this book is essentially the same. The poems are strong individually, but read together, they build something stronger. Images are repeated again and again with only slight variations (driving on the road, running out onto the road, lying in the road). The poems can’t help but to return to the same thing again. It’s painful, but it’s a delicious pain, glorious in love and lust and in being alternately strong and vulnerable. 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. You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. 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. Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. 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.” Once again, I return to rating poetry on a scale of "how much of it did I understand?" This one's language is easy to follow and the entire thing is comprehensive and you can really see the emotions and angst, but still, I couldn't find any deeper meanings in the poems. Perhaps I couldn't relate to them, but for the majority of this, I wasn't impressed. It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, 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 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.