Crush - Yale Series of Younger Poets Author:Richard Siken Yale Series of Younger Poets — Announcing the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, North America’s oldest annual literary prize — Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his re... more »ader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.
In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s 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.”« less