The 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition: a powerful, confessional, erotic collection

Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics CircleAward in Poetry

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

Richard Sikens Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, 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, Sikens voice is striking.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glck hails the cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness of Sikens 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.