Books › Crush
Crush
First published 2004 · 96 pages
A breathless, blood-soaked fever dream of obsessive love and the violence of wanting someone too much.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like being trapped in a speeding car with no brakes, hurtling through a dark, cinematic landscape of obsessive desire. The pace is relentlessly propulsive, driven by a frantic, breathless lyricism that blurs the line between romance and violence. It is a feverish, purgatorial experience, steeped in the messy, destructive reality of queer longing and the terrifying vulnerability of wanting to be consumed by another person. The poems read like desperate voicemails left at three in the morning, urgent, savage, and deeply confessional. It will utterly devastate readers who crave poetry that is unapologetically intense, offering a visceral exploration of toxic love that leaves you bruised, breathless, and completely transformed by its apocalyptic power.
- Mood
- feverish
- cinematic
- claustrophobic
- erotic
- Tone
- urgent
- confessional
- savage
- desperate
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- obsessive love · the violence of intimacy · queer longing · self-destruction · cinematic memory
- The writing
- Breathless, cinematic, and violently lyrical, characterized by frantic repetition and startling juxtapositions.
- The arc
- A frantic plunge into the depths of obsession that burns itself out into a bruised, lingering ache.
- Who it's for
- Readers who want poetry that feels like a panic attack and a love letter simultaneously, drawn to intense, messy queer longing.
Content notes
- toxic relationships
- blood and gore
- suicidal ideation
- homophobia
About the book
Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 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, competition judge Louise 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."
Description from Open Library.
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