This is also the way one would address an absence, allowing no pause for the silence that would constitute response. Accumulation and reiteration avert some impact, some deadly connection. The poem's desperate garrulousness delays catastrophe. You look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby?ĭo I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. I’m bleeding, I’m not just making conversation. Like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented, On jeans and hands and backs of matchbooks Names of collision in the dark, on the side of theīus, in the bark of the tree, in ballpoint pen Sure enough - Hello darling, welcome home.

Or caught in the throat like a lump of meat. Or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep, Shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, The names of flowers that open only once, Sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable, The book is all high beams: reeling, savage, headlong, insatiable: The poems' power derives from obsession, but Richard Siken's manner is sheer manic improv, with the poet in all the roles: he is the animal trapped in the headlights, paralyzed he is also the speeding vehicle, the car that doesn't stop, the mechanism of flight. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death. In the world of Crush, panic is a synonym for being: in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Nor is the condition analyzed or described - the speaker is never outside it long enough to differentiate panic from other states. The ones marked with a (∞) are my favourites, maybe check out those first?īecause I never really thought I was a poetry person - until I read these. Skip the tl dr foreword and read anything that catches your eye. I encourage you - even if you're not really a poetry person, if you're not really a reader, check this out.

This is mainly for self-reference, but I really do hope that someone will get something out of this. I also typed up the Foreword, tricky formatting and all, and included my favourite parts from his poems. I have spent roughly six hours or so (chemistry assessment task be damned!) digging up his poems from various corners of the web, in order to have them in one organized post. Because of this, there is a smooth flow from poem to poem, and the more you read, the more you'll love him. There is such a strong feeling of interconnectedness between his poems, so many repeated images and themes (the chlorinated pool, swallowing glass, a film called the Planet of Love, golden light, a man named Henry). I finally got a hold of Richard Siken's Crush, almost one whole year after I discovered him.

Crush by Richard Siken