Richard Siken's Crush, selected as this year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven aby obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him.
His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck 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 ...
