The Mortifying Ordeals of Being Known: a Review of Richard Siken’s Crush

The new trend in banner pics is for them to be hand drawn by the author

The new trend in banner pics is for them to be hand drawn by the author

The brief

First-year students are asked to write a 500 word review as a part of their first-term portfolios. The subject of the review can be anything the writer wants. One writer chose an award-winning collection by one of the internet’s favourite poets.

The first poem I read by Richard Siken was the first segment of “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” and it was like a suckerpunch to the gut, dare I say several suckerpunches. Siken sets the scene: you’re in a swimming pool with a boy who is holding your head underwater. First line. Second line, he is trying to kill you. First blow. Second blow, he is trying to kill you because you like him. In “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves,” Siken confronts you with a childhood memory. His, or yours? “A boy who likes boys is a dead boy,” this is your memory now.[1] You are in the eighth grade, in a small town, and being gay isn’t an option. What will you do?

This poem is the reason why I chose to read Crush first, over Siken’s second collection of poems, War of the Foxes. Crush is all about the panic and the obsession over one’s sexuality and can be summarized by just this one sentence: “the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.”[2] In this collection, Siken blends in a terrifying symphony the fear at the bottom of your stomach, the hungry love sitting right next to it, and the taste of blood. Yours, or his?

Siken’s approach on sexuality has made him popularly relatable on Tumblr, as a vast majority of Tumblr users are themselves part of the LGBT+ community. User ‘toschestation’ has found exactly the right words to describe Siken’s poetry: “richard siken was like what’s up im gay and i’m going to perfectly depict the trials and tribulations of every single emotion felt by every lgbt person who has ever existed in my work and you’re all going to accept it and feel personally victimized by it.”[3]

My reaction to Crush lies somewhere between bursting into tears and gasping. I have never felt more known or understood as when I read, “I wanted to hurt you. But the victory is I could not stomach it.”[2] In a very inexplicable way, Richard Siken truly gets it.

Crush is every Donna Tartt novel crushed into every Hozier song, and Richie Tozier and Adam Parrish being dissected and put back together wrong. It’s that deep-rooted shame of knowing you’ve done something wrong, something bad, something that makes you feel alive.

Winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush is a book to be read, and reread, and reread again, and while you do, you will always discover a new part of yourself, hiding and shivering in the dark until Siken brings it out into the light on it and finds the exact words to describe what you’ve been feeling all along.

Hands down Siken’s best work and perhaps one of the greatest collection of poems of the 21st century, give Crush a shot and you might just fall in love and end up reading War of the Foxes as well. Siken’s body of work is truly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read, and often I will come across a sentence of his and just lose it. This man reaches inside my guts and pulls out my shame in a way no one ever really has before, and I find it quite terrifying, which is probably why I’m so obsessed with his poetry and will recommend it until the day I die.

References

[1] Richard Siken, Crush, “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005).

[2] Richard Siken, Crush, “Snow and Dirty Rain” (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005).

[3] toschestation, Tumblr.

by Elise Peyrat

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