Richard Siken Books
Richard Siken es un poeta, pintor y cineasta estadounidense. Nació en Nueva York y es conocido por su estilo poético apasionado y visual.
Known for: Crush
Books by Richard Siken
Crush
Richard Siken’s Crush is a poetry collection about desire at its most ecstatic and most dangerous. First published in 2005, the book moves through love, grief, obsession, fear, memory, and emotional survival with startling intensity. These are not polite poems about romance. They are poems about wanting someone so deeply that the feeling reshapes perception, disturbs time, and blurs the line between tenderness and harm. Again and again, Siken presents love as pursuit, collision, confession, and aftermath. The result is a work that feels both intimate and cinematic, as if every emotion were unfolding under a harsh, unforgettable light. What makes Crush matter is not only its raw honesty, but its form. Siken writes in long, rushing lines, abrupt turns, and vivid images drawn from film, myth, art, and everyday life. His poems capture how the mind behaves under emotional pressure: repetitive, fractured, urgent, and hyperaware. Siken’s authority comes from his rare ability to transform private anguish into language that feels universally recognizable. Awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, Crush has become a defining collection for readers seeking poetry that tells the truth about longing, vulnerability, and what it takes to keep going after devastation.
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Love Arrives Like a Collision
Some books describe love as a gentle awakening; Crush insists it can feel more like impact. From its opening movements, Richard Siken establishes a speaker whose emotional life is already in motion, already speeding toward disaster or revelation. Desire does not unfold neatly here. It erupts. It str...
From Crush
Desire Is Intimate and Dangerous
One of the most unsettling truths in Crush is that intimacy does not automatically make us safe. Siken presents a central relationship charged with hunger, tenderness, fear, and instability. The beloved is not a simple romantic ideal. He is magnetic, vulnerable, elusive, and at times threatening in ...
From Crush
Memory Tries to Rescue What’s Gone
When reality cannot be changed, memory often becomes a form of control. In Crush, storytelling is not just self-expression; it is an attempt to reconstruct loss, preserve the beloved, and revise unbearable events through language. Siken’s speaker returns obsessively to scenes, details, bodies, and c...
From Crush
The Beloved Becomes Muse and Wound
In Crush, the beloved is never just a person. He becomes symbol, obsession, muse, threat, fantasy, and source of injury. This doubling is essential to the collection. Siken does not present love as a stable encounter between two fully knowable people. Instead, he shows how desire transforms the belo...
From Crush
Film, Art, and Fragmented Perception
Sometimes ordinary language cannot hold overwhelming feeling, so the mind borrows from other arts. One of Crush’s most distinctive qualities is its use of cinematic and visual imagery to express fractured perception. Siken writes as though scenes are being edited in real time: jump cuts, close-ups, ...
From Crush
Guilt, Survival, and Self-Examination
At a certain point, obsession turns inward. Crush does not remain only a book about wanting another person; it becomes a book about what that wanting reveals in the self. As the collection deepens, the speaker confronts guilt, shame, dependency, emotional exhaustion, and the difficult fact of surviv...
From Crush
About Richard Siken
Richard Siken es un poeta, pintor y cineasta estadounidense. Nació en Nueva York y es conocido por su estilo poético apasionado y visual. Su obra ha sido reconocida con el Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize y ha influido en una generación de lectores y escritores contemporáneos.
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Richard Siken es un poeta, pintor y cineasta estadounidense. Nació en Nueva York y es conocido por su estilo poético apasionado y visual.
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