Crush

Simply beautiful. Siken knows how to hit where it hurts.

Richard siken crush is one of one, I had to read it twice to fully grok it, the first read you will miss the lesson, the second read you’ll get the lesson and the romance.

It's hard to sum up these poems. They're so evocative and fascinating, often transforming their meaning and intent from line to line. In a way they are very much like the best noir films, constantly working at the edge of revelation and deception to create a narrative. The underlying themes of desire- much of it gay- and danger work beautifully with images of bullets, motorbikes, bodies and respite.

These are poems that you read when you want to tear your heart open and feel things. These poems kept me awake revisiting loves from my past and crying over the freshness of emotion that came over me. Reading these poems in like living reality in imaginary circumstances because you are there with Richard and you want to reach out and grab his hand and let him know that he is not alone. "Dirty Valentine" is a haunting recount of love that takes you over and never gives back what is taken: You swallow my heart and flee,but I want it back now baby. I want it back." These are the lines you hear in your head after reading this poem This is the heart of the poem and the heart of the book. Another poem that stands out is "Saying Your Names," words whispered to a lover in the darkness after making love: "Names called out across the water, names I called you behind your back, sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable, the names of flowers that open only once, shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,"(33) His command of imagery and form is unique in this book as well. As a poet, I am inspired by his example to write more poetry and to dig into my own life, find the poems that rest there and wake them up.

Richard Siken, Crush (Yale, 2005) When I compile my list of the ten best reads of the year, I have no doubt whatsoever that Richard Siken's first book, Crush, will be on that list, possibly at the top. I could stare at the cover for hours-- a close-up of a mouth, and a hand, thumb wet with blood, or perhaps motor oil. It fits perfectly with the contents of the book, which are clingy, suffocating, obsessive, and uniformly brilliant. Louise Gluck writes in her introduction that "[f]or a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing)...". She is, of course, correct; how obsessive can you be if you are not constantly turning your obsession over in your mind or your hands? And Siken provides a picture of obsession that is hauntingly pure. "...Your name like a song I sing to myself, your name like a box where I keep my love, your name like a nest in the tree of love, your name like a boat in the sea of love-- O now we're in the sea of love! Your name like detergent in the washing machine. Your name like two Xs like punched-in eyes, like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter, your name with two Xs to mark the spots, to hold the place, to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost. I'm saying your name in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that's been transposed..." ("Saying Your Names") There is something not right about this, and it's obvious from even a cursory read. In the hands of many (perhaps most) other poets, a passage like this would come off sappy-sweet. Siken makes it distressing, darkening it until finally the reader is trapped there in the pit with him, for no matter how dark this collection gets (and this is the tip of the iceberg), there is always that seductive, lilting quality to Siken's lines that never quite lets the reader go, even long after the back cover is shut. This is one for the ages. *****

Richard Siken's Crush is urgent, its voice an aggressive invasion. From the first sentence of his first poem, the reader engages death, love, and longing. "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again" (3). There are no subtleties here, only language that literally forces the reader to engage the writing and the beauty of the rhythm on the page. It is in this language and rhythm that Siken develops a very tight and eloquent structure. Siken's voice is consistent throughout the collection - at times raw, uninhibited, escaping the clothed bitter aftertaste of conventional language and in other parts soft, rhythmic, alliterative, and safe. "The Dislocated Room" is crafted in just such a manner. It begins on a beautiful evening where it would seem all is at peace: It was night for many miles and then the real stars in the purple sky, like little boats rowed out too far, begin to disappear. And there, in the distance, not the promised land, but a Holiday Inn. (46) But the dislocation begins. The reader quickly peels back the layers of the poem and finds something sinister and raw in a Holiday Inn somewhere, anywhere in America. This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the space between one note and the next, the part where you confuse his hand with the room, the dog with the man, the blood with the ripped up sky. He puts his hands all over you to keep you in the room. ( 47) The sky is no longer purple with stars "like little boats rowed out too far" but violated, filthy, stained. Yet, what still pulls the reader further inside the poetry is Siken's use of "you". We feel a part. It's as if an anonymous ghost haunts the page and Siken continually addresses it. We welcome this ghost and, eventually, feel that when Siken uses "you" he is speaking directly to us, the reader. In "Boot Theory", for example, Siken uses repetition to provide a certain structure. "A man walks into a bar and says:" (20). These are simple words, simple declarative statements, but what follows, explores, crosses boundaries, creates an invasion of sorts, and seeks to develop the ghostly "you". You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich, and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you and he keeps kicking you. You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don't work. Boots continue to fall to the floor in the apartment above you. (20) It isn't the repetition of "A man walks into a bar and says"

I just finished reading Richard Siken's Crush, the recent Yale winner. It is a phenomenal book. And I don't say that lightly. What strikes me the most about this book is the absolute command of the line Siken has. That might sound like mumbo jumbo to some, but his lines seemed guided both by cadence and by rational thought. Add to this a hauntingly dark, brutal, violent landscape and what you get is something absolutely memorable. At times, Siken's poems are pure lyric, love lyrics, but always there is the grit to ground such poems. These are poems with speakers who want desperately to understand what is going on around them, want to explain them. But time and time again, the poems demonstrate that we are incapable of ever really recounting experience with any real degree of faithfulness. And gorgeous, these poems are. I am glad there are poets like Louise Gluck out there judging book contests because the world needs books like this one. It is easily one of the best first books published in the last decade. It heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice. I will be anxiously and "faithfully" looking for Mr. Siken's work in the future.