Crush

This debut collection by Richard Siken earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, when Louise Glück chose it from the competition. The poems stay with a single fixation and the love that both drives and damages the speaker. Their candid treatment of desire between men is frank and often raw, and the imagery turns violent and sensual at once.

Glück's introduction praises the poems' cumulative momentum and their sense of urgency, and argues that work of this kind revives poetry's ability to speak at a decisive moment. Readers should expect long, rushing lines that build pressure rather than settle into quiet reflection.