Crush

Richard Siken is cofounder and editor of the literary magazine spork. He received two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan Residency Fellowships, and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“One book I keep returning to is Richard Siken’s Crush. . . . The poems are vivid, heaving things, stuffed with obsession and surprises. . . . The poems aren’t comforting, but they’re invigorating. This is a book about thrashing around in the great big world, being messy, being alive.”—Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times Book Review“Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry.”—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post“Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken’s] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.”—Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) “A powerful collection of poems . . . at once confessional, gay, savage, and charged with a violent eroticism.”—ForecastFinalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in PoetryWinner of the 2005 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, sponsored by The Publishing Triangle“Crush is a wondrous, brilliant book. Richard Siken’s poetry is daring in its construction, graceful yet startling in its beauty, and complicit with emotions and states of mind that would have remained unintelligible without him.”—Dennis Cooper