Published in America by Yale University Press in April 2005.
Featured in Cover Characteristics: Hands
How I got this book:
Downloaded for free via On The Other Side Of Reality
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
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. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck 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."
Crush was enthusiastically reviewed at On The Other Side Of Reality as 'one of my all-time favorite poetry collections' so I was keen to experience Siken's work for myself. Crush isn't a particularly long book and I comfortably read it in an evening, however I am not sure I successfully understood what I read! Even the poems I revisited are cloudy. I appreciate Siken's use of graphic imagery and the repetitive structure of some of the phrases where their meaning is subtly altered as the poem progresses. Overall though reading Crush felt like eavesdropping on a conversation in a language in which I am only partially fluent. Sometimes I had flashes of clarity and felt I could envisage just what Siken had written about. Most of the time I felt as though the meaning was just out of reach. I got the gist, but completely missed the nuances. A shame
Etsy Find!
| |
by Boutique Poetry in
London, England
Click pic to visit Etsy Shop |
Search Literary Flits for more:
Books by Richard Siken / Poetry / Books from America