Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry--an erotic powerful
collection "One of the best books of contemporary poetry."--Victoria Chang Huffington Post
"Vital immediate and cinematic in scope."-- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) Selected by
Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück 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. 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. In her introduction to the book Glück 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."
