A review by moonpix
Crush by Richard Siken

5.0

Well what can I say that wasn't already said in the excellent introduction by Louise Glück. Despite its dissemination as short excerpts and its reinterpretations onto popular media in Tumblr’s heyday, this collection is of course best in its original, whole form. In fact I think it is one of the most successful collections of poetry I've ever read because of its sense of completeness, its ever enclosing references towards itself. Poetry by nature is abstract, fragmentary— that Siken preserves this while creating such a rich, interlocking narrative is nothing short of masterful.

He is also deceptively skilled in pacing: these poem’s repetitious hysteria makes it difficult to stop reading once you have started, makes it difficult to reflect on the work instead of just feeling it. But unlike many contemporary poets, especially ones that try on similar formal modes to Siken, this fast pace is not meant to hide a lack of beauty or meaning. On the contrary— this is poetry that supports both emotional and intellectual modes of reading, perhaps just in an unconventional way, for it is only though the emotion of panic that analysis can take place. All reflections on the part of the narrator here are prompted by the crisis of trauma, experiences that force a deep reevaluation of the self and the other. For the reader then too, forced to closely inhabit these emotions with him, all intellectual understanding of the work must first come through a more visceral experience of it.

In doing this I also found myself better appreciating the way he undercuts or complicates the suffusion of panic in these poems with humor— there are many wry asides, moments of self awareness and cynicism, the narrator seeing himself from the outside. In the hands of most other writers this would not work for me, but the humor is never dead here, it is always just as lurid as the rest of the work. And yes, perhaps lurid is the word to end on, the best way to describe Crush. The terror of being in a body, the melodrama of the mind, life and death and love and sex… this is what poetry should be about!!!

“His shoulder blots out the stars but the minutes don't stop. He covers my body

with his body but the minutes

don't stop. The smell of him mixed with creosote, exhaust --

There, on the ground, slipping through the minutes,

trying to notch them. Like taking the same picture over and over, the spaces in between sealed up --

Knocked hard enough to make the record skip

and change its music, setting the melody on its

forward course again, circling and circling the center hole in the flat black disk.

And words, little words,

words too small for any hope or promise, not really soothing

but soothing nonetheless.”