Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. Siken is beyond talented with words, that much is clear, this entire collection is a work of pure art, something you rarely find these days. I also thought his endings consistently flopped: almost half the poems end with some form of repetition (either direct or implied).

In Louise Glück's review of the poem, she makes the following observation, "Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out is a brilliant poem on love and all the stories and roles we project upon it, even if the outcomes are far from what we expected based on childhood templates of fairy tales. I'll never stop reading this book, and that's the great thing with poetry, analyzing, understanding and interpreting and simply feeling it, is a never-ending process. The desire to touch, the gesture of touching, becomes dangerous, damaging, after the hand, withheld for so long, finally makes an attempt at contact.But similar to any caffeinated drink, if taken in excess, Crush palpitates into a ramble of overlapping emotions, eroticism, and words with only nearly achieving any kind of infectious poetic vibrancy it probably aims for. and it isn't that I am adverse to imagery of blood, bones, death, gravel rocks and roads, bruises and ruin, etc. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. His poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gl ck hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.

Whilst it also traverses realisations and remembrances throughout the complications of same sex attraction, it is insatiably hungry for love and the many faces it dons. They were used so often, though, and I think any edge that initially came from them was lost when they became familiar from repetition. I guess for the most part I'm realizing that I maybe grew out of it before I had the chance to read it.