Richard Siken’s poetry collection focuses on the obsessive, often violent nature of desire and the physical aftermath of romantic longing. The poems utilize cinematic imagery, involving car chases, motel rooms, and blood, to illustrate how one person becomes consumed by another. Siken maps out the geography of the male body through a lens of panic and hunger, frequently shifting perspectives between the hunter and the hunted. The text examines the architecture of a crush as a series of collisions where the boundary between self-preservation and self-destruction disappears entirely.
This book serves readers who are interested in the visceral intersections of queer intimacy and psychological distress. Those who study contemporary poetics find here a distinct use of repetition and second-person narration that forces an immediate confrontation with the text. The reader leaves with a granular understanding of how infatuation functions as a form of haunting. It provides a vocabulary for the frantic, unpolished reality of wanting someone to the point of erasure, stripping away the traditional romanticism often associated with love poems.
Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and open-ended; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Wisdom Collector. Which reader are you?
Insights from Crush
“The way he looked at me was a kind of prayer.”
God is just another guy who isn't texting you back. He's hovering over the scene but he never helps. He just watches the blood spill.
“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.”
Love is basically a crime scene you keep returning to. You aren't looking for healing. You are looking for a witness to the damage.
“I’m trying to explain to you that I’m broken and blooming.”
The bodies in these pages are always being disassembled. It makes you realize that wanting someone is mostly a violent urge to take them apart.
“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him.”
Every poem is just a different way of getting hit by a car. Desire feels less like romance and more like a high speed collision. You don't survive it.
- Published
- 2005
- Language
- EN
