![]() ![]() ![]() Scholars and poets also frequently describe their relationship to Siken in superlative terms: one writer included Siken on a list of poets who changed my life, while another poet writes that she “literally carried Crush everywhere I went for three or four years.” After a ten-day stint at a writers conference, no fewer than five poets directed me to Siken, his name coming off their lips with the same tenderness allotted to a lover: People who claim not to like poetry go out and buy Siken’s book after reading a single poem, which has likely been have blogged and re-blogged with a short introduction that asserts this is one of the blogger’s absolute favorite poems of all time. It’s no coincidence that Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poet prize, can be described with the same vocabulary as an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: like the long-running series, Crush is a self-consciously campy work that has become a cult classic. Dread so palpable you can practically hear the slow creep of chords in the diminished fifth. A back-alley stabbing at an innocent dance on a courthouse lawn. ![]()
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