Crush

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken

Richard Siken's Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, is driven by obsession and love—confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Gluck hailed the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. "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."

Since its publication, Crush has become a modern classic. It is one of the books most often read by young poets, and it is frequently taught and assigned. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.

About the Author

Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of War of the Foxes and I Do Know Some Things. Siken lives in Tucson, AZ. Louise Gluck was a Nobel Prize-winning poet and the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2003 to 2010.

Dana Levin is a poet and essayist who teaches at Maryville University and Bennington College. She lives in St. Louis, MO.