Crush

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry—an erotic, powerful collection

"One of the best books of contemporary poetry."—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

"Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope."—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)

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. 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.

In her introduction to the book, 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.”