Crush by Richard Siken

This collection about obsession and love is the 99th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets
 
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.
 
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'Crush's power derives from obsession, but Richard Siken's manner is sheer manic improv... What holds is sheer art, despite the apparent abandon.... Books of this kind...restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.' - Louise Gluck, from the foreword