It’s been a little while since I’ve cracked open a book of poetry, but Richard Siken’s Crush just so happened to randomly enter my orbit, and I’m so glad it did! This is not your typical collection of poems, it’s essentially broken the rules to deliver something that is at times gut-wrenching and at others beautiful. It’s things like these that always keep my love of reading and writing poetry alive.
In Crush, we are introduced to the work with a forward that describes the upcoming prose as being about panic without ever saying the word. And he doesn’t need to. In just layout alone, Siken perfectly portrays the feeling of being off balance and of chaos. Some of his prose are long and beautiful, but by the time you’re almost used to that rhythm, he stops you dead in your tracks with a short and blunt phrase. He also aligns his text in an array of ways so that you never really get to stick with one style in a work. Aside from the presentation of chaos, he also writes in a way that has you looping back and forth between events so much so that I felt slightly anxious while reading. But that was the intended effect! Goal achieved.
Siken also writes of obsession, which at times can be sweetly passionate, while in more instances it is aggressive and violent. His obsession is with love, but he also associates love with death (since these works were partially inspired by the death of his boyfriend), and it quickly turns those entries into despair. Occasionally laced within his works on obsession are bouts of humor, but just like with his take on love, the humor quickly sours and become violent again.
The journey this collection of poems took me on was incredibly vulnerable, and I felt very connected to the work as I was reading it. I found myself consumed in Siken’s created world, and didn’t surface again until I had reached the final entry. If you’ve got any passion for poetry, I would definitely suggest you give this a read.