What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. His fans’ favorite lines are “bodies seized by light” and “love too will wreck.” 1. The Richard Siken poems address matters like love, life, and enduring in this world. In addition, he works as a social worker full-time and resides in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Siken has won a Pushcart Prize.
Yale University Press published crush in 2006 and earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 2004. Siken himself has explained the sectioning of the Crush as “The first part is man against man, the second is man against God, the third is God, the director of the movie, in a helicopter trying to give advice and finding that no one is listening.”.Most people are familiar with Richard Siken poems from his poetry collection “Crush.” In 2004, the poetry book took first place in the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.īlue Jupiter, War of the Foxes, and Crush are all written by Richard Siken. In the third section (which begins with “Planet of Love” and ends with “Snow and Dirty Rain”), the speaker has been shot and is dying against his will. In the second section (which begins with “Visible World” and ends with “Saying Your Names”), death is understood as a reality. In the first section (which begins with “Scheherazade” and ends with “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”), death is viewed romantically and with longing. What holds is sheer art, despite the apparent abandon.”“ – from the blurb of Crush.Ĭrush is split into three sections, each of which aimed to move the reader through the speaker’s relationship with death. And the triumph of Crush is that it writhes and blazes while at the same time holding the reader utterly: ‘sustaining interest’ seems far to mild a term for this effect.
The risk of obsessive material is that it may get boring, repetitious, predictable, shrill. In the dictionary, among the word’s many meanings, ‘to press between opposing bodies so as to break or injure to oppress to break, pound or grind.’ Or, as a noun, ‘extreme pressure.’ Out of this cauldron of destruction, its informal meaning: infatuation, the sweet fixation of girl on boy. As the distinguished poet and competition judge Louise Glück writes in the Foreword, "If panic is his ground note, Siken’s obsessive focus is a tyrant, the body. It is a powerful new collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. “Richard Siken’s Crush is the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
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