Crush Richard Siken, Louise Gluck

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 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 sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form."

Richard Siken lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is cofounder and editor of the literary magazine spork.

"Siken captures better than any other of his generation the borderlessness of eroticism (in this case, homoeroticism): filled with panicked, desperate, off-the-rails longing and obsession, up to paranoia, this collection captures the ease with which lust slips into various violences, slips into despair, slips into oblivion. These poems reek of actual danger; rhythmically and narratively controlled, they nevertheless make the reader feel unsafe -- a place few poetries are wont to take their audience, and more's the pity. Siken embodies the work in a way that renders its force and presence inescapable. The poems "swerve and rush" syntactically, a psychosis of passionate paralysis that permeates every line and stanza. Would that the legions of dispossessed youth who think today's print-published poetry deaf to their strongest emotional convictions could read this book; Crush rebukes those critics who think sexy, dangerous, craving poetry can't be rendered in a manner consistent with the very highest standards of art." - Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post