Siken’s body of work is truly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read, and often I will come across a sentence of his and just lose it. Hands down Siken’s best work and perhaps one of the greatest collection of poems of the 21st century, give Crush a shot and you might just fall in love and end up reading War of the Foxes as well. Winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush is a book to be read, and reread, and reread again, and while you do, you will always discover a new part of yourself, hiding and shivering in the dark until Siken brings it out into the light on it and finds the exact words to describe what you’ve been feeling all along. It’s that deep-rooted shame of knowing you’ve done something wrong, something bad, something that makes you feel alive. But the victory is I could not stomach it.” In a very inexplicable way, Richard Siken truly gets it.Ĭrush is every Donna Tartt novel crushed into every Hozier song, and Richie Tozier and Adam Parrish being dissected and put back together wrong. I have never felt more known or understood as when I read, “I wanted to hurt you. My reaction to Crush lies somewhere between bursting into tears and gasping. User ‘toschestation’ has found exactly the right words to describe Siken’s poetry: “richard siken was like what’s up im gay and i’m going to perfectly depict the trials and tribulations of every single emotion felt by every lgbt person who has ever existed in my work and you’re all going to accept it and feel personally victimized by it.” Siken’s approach on sexuality has made him popularly relatable on Tumblr, as a vast majority of Tumblr users are themselves part of the LGBT+ community.

Crush is all about the panic and the obsession over one’s sexuality and can be summarized by just this one sentence: “the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.” In this collection, Siken blends in a terrifying symphony the fear at the bottom of your stomach, the hungry love sitting right next to it, and the taste of blood. This poem is the reason why I chose to read Crush first, over Siken’s second collection of poems, War of the Foxes. You are in the eighth grade, in a small town, and being gay isn’t an option.

His, or yours? “A boy who likes boys is a dead boy,” this is your memory now. In “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves,” Siken confronts you with a childhood memory. Second blow, he is trying to kill you because you like him. Siken sets the scene: you’re in a swimming pool with a boy who is holding your head underwater. The first poem I read by Richard Siken was the first segment of “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” and it was like a suckerpunch to the gut, dare I say several suckerpunches.

Crush by Richard Siken