I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush

The Huffington Post's Victoria Chang praises the poet for writing with a "cinematic brilliance and urgency". [4] A powerful collection of poems . . . at once confessional, gay, savage, and charged with a violent eroticism.- Forecast 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. will be marked in my reading annals as re-discovering my love of poetry. My favorite of the new poets I've discovered is Richard Siken. His first volume of poems Crush, was a revelation to me; Crush changed poetry for me.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. Bullets, movie-like violence, car rides, stitches and gritty motel rooms form recurring themes in this bundle. The world sketched is grimy and bleak, with occasional flashes of beauty and tenderness, despite violence 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. 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.” Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out is a brilliant poem on love and all the stories and roles we project upon it, even if the outcomes are far from what we expected based on childhood templates of fairy tales. Violence is also something that permeates the poetry of Crush, giving it a gritty and slightly desolate feel.

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. After a few poems you notice the repetition pretty early on. I figured it was a reoccurring theme type thing, which I usually grow fond of, but it kind of felt like saying the same thing over and over. After the first few poems it lost me until the second to last poem which I liked in a weird-dream-sequence kind of way, but even that dragged on just a little too long. 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. Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again." 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 carry his words with me everywhere, both in the shape of his actual book, but also in who I am. terrifically raw, dark, glimmering beautiful. i'm regretful that i'm not currently in a place where i can process such raw passion and anguish and aching (both aching as in longing and aching as in hurting). it's something that you need to be in the right emotional place for, to be present for feelings as vivid as these. i'll have to revisit this someday.

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!! 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 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. You are playing cards with three Jeffs. One is your father, one is your brother, and the other is your current boyfriend. All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep. Your boyfriend Jeff gets up to answer the phone. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room. Phone's for you, Jeff says. Hey! 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. Please let it be the right one." It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,/green beautiful green./It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green." -Meanwhile

siken captures the Gay Longing in such a perfect, powerful way & suddenly you feel your heart taking root in your body

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. 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. how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple

Richard Siken his debut bundle is exciting. The American setting, with derelict towns, very much reminded me of Ocean Vuong his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the thematic overlap continues with the focus on gay love. At times bitter, harsh and disappointed, sometimes lyrical, the poems in Crush feel both urgent and true.

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. This last panel from "You Are Jeff" concluded one of the best poems from this book. 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. The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.”