Richard Siken – författare

'A spectacular comeback' Jeremy Noel Tod, Prospect'Siken’s signature intensity still throbs between sentences' The Yale ReviewA collection of pitch-perfect prose poems written in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic stroke. From the author of cult poetry bestseller, Crush.Richard Siken’s Crush was an underground international sensation. Twenty years on, he returns with the momentous I Do Know Some Things, cinematic in its tragic vision and emotive force.In the aftermath of a stroke, the poet’s language and much of his memory is, for a time, wiped out. As his mind gropes its way back from oblivion, the scenery flickers between memories of a ruptured childhood and queer coming-of-age, and the precipice of the present. Each poem is a room in a ‘house owned by ghosts'.In these seventy-seven prose poems, Siken has forged a new voice at once terrifying and vital. Brave in content and in method, I Do Know Some Things demands his recognition as an essential poet of our times.‘Thrums with reinvention: of the self, of the prose poem, of the false divide between the everyday and the surreal’ Andrew McMillanPraise for Crush:'Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power' Louise Glück‘The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated’ Ocean Vuong

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry—an erotic, powerful collection  An Atlantic choice for “Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)”  “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.”

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the influential first poetry collection by Richard Siken  An Atlantic choice for “Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)”  Since winning the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush has become a modern classic. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.