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. At times bitter, harsh and disappointed, sometimes lyrical, the poems in Crush feel both urgent and true.

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. 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). His poems progress to a down tempo drum beat, and the skill in line break leaves the reader constantly moving forward, the combination forces us to digest and contemplate the words as they come, but never let up a moment for us to stop chewing.Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. 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. and it isn't that I am adverse to imagery of blood, bones, death, gravel rocks and roads, bruises and ruin, etc. The opening poem, Scheherazade (the title references to the character from One Thousand and One Nights) intimates inevitability and is foreboding in its tone.

History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. I am not a poetry fan so some parts at the beginning cracked me up and I tried to find some sense in them and I failed.

Otherwise, though, the poems are so overblown (too many words going in too many directions) and drowning in imagery of bodies, knives, and death. Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by panic and obsession.

A poetry collection inconsolable of its particular homosexual aching and desire, Crush grinds words into a cup of caffeine-infused affection. 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. Whilst it also traverses realisations and remembrances throughout the complications of same sex attraction, it is insatiably hungry for love and the many faces it dons.favorites: "litany in which certain things are crossed out," "visible world," "a primer for the small weird loves," "you are jeff. Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Gluck as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken's Crush is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love.