Crush Richard Siken Views

General Goods

Richard Siken is an American poet. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Crush, which won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2004, and is the editor of spork literary magazine. Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his book Crush was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry in 2005,[1] and the Thom Gunn Award from The Publisher's Triangle. The 1991 death of his boyfriend influenced his writing of the book.[2]

In the opening statement of her foreword to Richard Siken’s debut collection, Louise Gluck remarks, “This is a book about panic.” While the book indeed operates on themes of desperation, life-threatening situations, and an unavoidable sense of danger to body and soul, Siken’s poetry achieves greatness on many different levels. Siken’s themes and images range from the crushing effect of tragedy, (Road Music or Driving, Not Washing) the haunting influence of dreams, (Dirty Valentine and I Had a Dream About You) the insatiable human desire for emotional and sexual relations and the fall out thereof, (Wishbone and Dislocated Room) and the inescapable, unexplainable hope of redemption (Seaside Improvisation and Visible World).

Richard Sikena’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glpück 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.o”

Richard Siken Welcome to the one year anniversary of Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are proud to bring you the poet, Richard Siken. Siken's work is fun and cool and frightening like a boyhood friend who sees no reason to stop wrestling just because one of you has lost a tooth. Please enjoy this reading from Crush by Richard Siken.