Crush by Richard Siken

This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.
 
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 is a wondrous, brilliant book. Richard Aiken's poetry is daring in its construction, graceful yet startling in its beauty, and complicit with emotions and states of mind that would have remained unintelligible without him' - Dennis Cooper
 
'The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has had on 21st century American poetry cannot be overstated.' - Ocean Vuong