Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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It changed me, and I'm not even kidding or exaggerating. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. Words I was never able to find myself, but needed more deeply than I'd realised. I am in love with it. That's the easiest way to put it. My copy is worn out from being opened, read in, then thrown onto the table or put carelessly down as I try to gather myself up from my messy emotional pile on the floor and try to deal with, well... myself.

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!! 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. 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 It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,

Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken's] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) Once again, I return to rating poetry on a scale of "how much of it did I understand?" This one's language is easy to follow and the entire thing is comprehensive and you can really see the emotions and angst, but still, I couldn't find any deeper meanings in the poems. Perhaps I couldn't relate to them, but for the majority of this, I wasn't impressed. siken captures the Gay Longing in such a perfect, powerful way & suddenly you feel your heart taking root in your body How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers/by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing." -Road Music 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.SIken's Crush, his first book which also won the Yale Young Poets' award in 2004, is one of he most complete works of poetry I've come across in years.

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. This little poetry book is divided into three parts, the author at first doesn't tell you what is going on but later all the parts are related and is kind of a story. Mostly every chapter contain the word “kill”, “suicide”, and “hit” it was tiresome reading the same chapters over and over with the same words just in different scenarios, the person who speak and tells these stories is in an abusive relationship and want to escape so this person just create scenarios in their head and speak aloud for some kind of liberation. I only liked the first but after that every section describes how this abusive relationship started and grew.You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terr­ible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. 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. This is not a book about Prometheus, but it may as well be. (We are playing with fire here, after all. At least, love can feel like a fire.) Every poem in this book is essentially the same. The poems are strong individually, but read together, they build something stronger. Images are repeated again and again with only slight variations (driving on the road, running out onto the road, lying in the road). The poems can’t help but to return to the same thing again. It’s painful, but it’s a delicious pain, glorious in love and lust and in being alternately strong and vulnerable. 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.

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

What the book doesn’t tell you directly is that Richard Siken was partially influenced by the death of his boyfriend. I don’t want to make any assumptions here about how that has influenced the content, but I will say that the poems read like a lover trying to move on from something that is, well, crushing. Moving on is not something you can just will yourself to do.