Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. They were used so often, though, and I think any edge that initially came from them was lost when they became familiar from repetition. Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken's] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.

History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. Images are repeated again and again with only slight variations (driving on the road, running out onto the road, lying in the road).The poem Saying Your Names should be read loudly, so loudly that the names and the verses will take place in your mind and between your ribs.

My copy is worn out from being opened, read in, then thrown onto the table or put carelessly down as I try to gather myself up from my messy emotional pile on the floor and try to deal with, well. In the foreword to Crush, competition judge Louise Glück wrote that the poems contained "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness", and that "Books of this kind dream big [. I am not a poetry fan so some parts at the beginning cracked me up and I tried to find some sense in them and I failed.

Siken, the winner of the 2004 Yale Series, is clearly a capable poet, and there were a few moments in this collection that were beautiful and lucid. So… while I couldn’t make out what the poet was trying to communicate (or WHY) for most of the time I spent reading Crush, I tried not to let this ruin my experience. This powerful collection of poems is extravagant and erotic, confrontational and confused, bloody and brutal, ferocious and feral. I also thought his endings consistently flopped: almost half the poems end with some form of repetition (either direct or implied).