- Crush Richard Siken Hardcover
- Crush Richard Siken Pdf Download
- Richard Siken Scheherazade
- Richard Siken Poem
The last page of Louise Glück’s introduction to Richard Siken’s Crush succinctly phrases the problem of recounting Siken’s magnetizing, operatic work: “In other ways, this introduction has been difficult; because of the poems’ interconnectedness, the temptation has been to quote everything. Such difficulty is, in itself, praise of the work.”
Reading poetry that breathes like a story can be a challenge. The poems must command a lyrical space while tying up loose ends. A narrative set of poems can sometimes, quite literally, hang together by a single, narrow (sometimes pointless) thread. If to read poems that move past the story form into the crippling beyond of human indictment is to bear witness, then to analyze and speak of them is to give testimony. As the poems in this collection tend to self-destruction and negate at their own accord, consuming Siken’s poetry is akin to a religious act, and the immaculate responsibility is placed in the hands of the reader.
- Richard Siken's 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.
- Richard Siken's 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.
- Richard Siken’s 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.
Crush Richard Siken Hardcover
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, filmmaker, and an editor at Spork Press. In her profile of Siken, Nell Casey wrote, “he effectively juxtaposes holy wishes with mundane images—making them both seem beautiful by some strange lyrical alchemy.”.
Consider the first poem of the collection, “Sheherazade”: “Tell me about the dream where we pull bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again. / How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running / until they forget they are horses.”
There is an implicit corruption within the poems that provokes the reader to fill in the blanks (“Tell me about the dream…”). More harrowing, the images Siken evokes are movie-like, perhaps easy to conjure. Somewhere there is projector throwing vignettes of whiskey, sex, and skin; but also swimming pools, barbeques, and a radios playing all night long. There are juxtapositions of time, “It’s night. It’s noon. He’s driving. It’s happening all over again.” There is no clear separation between naughty and nice or fantasy and violence; only extreme pressure.
Crush Richard Siken Pdf Download
If it is, as Slavoj Zizek says, the form that validates the traumatic content, Siken’s poems receive their authenticity by appearing in a ravaged dreamscape. The words weave across the page and repeat themselves. The narrator is allowed to make demands. The background often only serves to self-immure and efface what little space we have left to stand on. To put it simply, even the phrases seems damaged, or rearranged as if they were exhausting themselves to the point of conceiving a truth: “The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to / sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him / you will want to get inside him, and ruin him, / but he doesn’t listen. / You do this, you do. You take the things you love / and tear them apart / or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours. / So you kiss him, and he doesn’t move, he doesn’t / pull away and you keep on kissing him.”
Richard Siken Scheherazade
The collection itself has had a monolithic impact on the world poetry. Victoria Chang referenced it in a recent interview with The Rumpus, the collection itself was published as part of the Yale Younger Series of Poets, and the internet is now populated with tattoos quoting Siken. At minimum, Siken’s efforts to automate an otherwise dismal poetry scene by giving us something fresh and genre-defying are commendable: “Jeff is thinking about his brother down the winding road before him. He is thinking that if only he could cut him open and peel him back and crawl inside this second skin, then he could relive that last mile again: reborn, wide-eyed, free.”
Richard Siken Poem
The language is pulverizing, even unashamed of its darkness. Siken’s poems delineate a previously unconscious path between desire and trauma, his characters are well-dressed and sexy, his imagery is cinematic, but of course, true to form, they leave us with the good kind of hurt – the wanting.
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