Over fifteen years after its original publication, I am here to praise one of the most raw and passionate works of contemporary poetry. Richard Siken’s Crush has left me empty; my heart has been scraped out and left sitting right in front of me. But at the same time, I’m not really empty at all; I feel the most understood I’ve ever felt in my entire life.
Siken has always been one of my favorite writers; his perception of time and reality always felt incredibly personal to me. Naturally, when I got around to it, I was glad to read his first book, which is a collection of poems “driven by obsession and love.” It feels less like a bunch of paper bound together and more like cracking open someone’s ribs and poking and prodding at their heart.
Winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Crush is more than just sensational, it’s desperately romantic, yet invasively eager and honest. His words feel like the thoughts we often don’t even acknowledge in our own heads, and he splays them out on the table like a grand feast. He lets them sit there, vulnerable, and dirty all at once.
I believe Crush is the kind of book you read over and over and over again, picking up on a new primal emotion every time. With each pass through, you’ll relate to a different version of Siken, often in ways completely different from the poem’s conventual meaning.
In “The Emotional Impact of Crush (And Why You Should Read It),” Nicole Catarino writes:
“Through the crux of the book stems from the discussion of love and the horror that can come with it, Siken, more than anything, writes about the mundane in a way that seems significant. He finds a way to put words to small but poignant human experiences in a way that both terrifies and comforts—the former, because it forces you to confront things that typically remain unspoken; the latter because you discover that somebody else has felt the same you do.”
And that truly is what Crush gives its readers, a sense of understanding. An acknowledgment of the brutal ways people love one another and the marks left on them after they part ways. Reading Siken’s work reminds me of two lovers embracing as one pierces the other with a knife. A kind of, darling I will love you forever and it will destroy you for it. There’s a sort of pain in the stories he tells, no matter how sweet they appear at first. This can be seen in Siken’s poem, “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves”:
“The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to
sleep in your bed. You try to warn him you tell him
you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,
but he doesn’t listen.
You do this, you do. You take things you love
and tear them apart
or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.
So, you kiss him, and he doesn’t move, he doesn’t
pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn’t moved,
he’s frozen, and you’ve kissed him, and he’ll never
forgive you, and maybe now he’ll leave you alone.”
There is a progression of time throughout Crush, but it’s told in circles. Siken forces his readers to relive these vulnerable moments of his, pushing them to see what he didn’t see when he lived them. It is only after the intense and violent flashbacks, that he is able to discover what had been unearthed in him all along.
In the Foreword, Louise Gluck perfectly encapsulates what it is to be wedged into these sequences of intense memories:
“The poems’ power derives from obsession, but Richard Siken’s manner is sheer manic improv, with the poet in all the roles: he is the animal trapped in the headlights, paralyzed; he is also the speeding vehicle, the car that doesn’t stop, the mechanism of flight.”
There’s an aspect to being in pain and being the reason you’re in pain. To be the abuser and to be the abused. To rewrite the story over and over until it paints you in the worst light possible, as if punishing oneself for having loved in the first place.
This is something Siken plays with a lot in Crush. In his famous poem, “I Am Jeff,” every single person in his universe is named Jeff: his father, brother, boyfriend, himself, and the twins at the hairpin turn. In reality, none of the individual Jeffs particularly mattered; the true meaning is that we are all Jeff. We are all made up of parts of the people we once knew and who we will eventually know. We are all Jeff. At least that is how I interpreted it.
Siken does a fantastic job of letting his readers come to their own conclusions. Although some say Crush was somewhat inspired by Siken’s boyfriend dying in the 90s, one does not have to have experienced that to experience what he writes about. Siken also writes with a sort of introspection most are unable to come close to. In “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” he writes:
“You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.”
In an interview with Siken, James Hall asked, “Can you talk about how you construct a poem’s emotion without letting that emotion subsume the poem? What tools are available to a poet to mitigate emotion successfully?” Siken replies:
“Just because you’re self-aware doesn’t mean you can change what’s happening…Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking ‘I am falling to the floor crying’ but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well and when you’re having sex with your next lover on this very floor they will also notice that you didn’t paint it very well and they will think less of you for it. And then you think ‘Is that sentence too long?’ And then you have to hold the contradictions of sobbing uncontrollably and wondering about grammar in your head at the same time. I think if you are true to the entire experience, not just the sad part, you don’t risk sentimentality because you’re not overloading the experience with fake, melodramatic feeling.”
This, I believe, is the key to Siken’s deep rooted pain within his work. While other writers of our time work to remove all self-awareness for the sake of preserving the sanctity of superficial authenticity, Siken dives in headfirst toward self-awareness, using it to fling himself over and through haze of superficiality. He uses this introspective approach to ask his lover a question, only to turn around, reach into his own chest, pull at his own heart, and ask himself the question himself. This reflection is a large part of Crush and what makes it the masterpiece that it truly is. There’s a sort of sobriety in Siken’s words. Although he is drunk on desire, guilt, and grief, he uses his newfound time to interject with incredible hindsight.
I could on and on about my favorite poems and my favorite quotes within them. Siken has a way of making the most insignificant moments feel the most whimsical. I think, in a way, he does that with people as well. When I read his work, I feel so understood. Maybe we all spend too long staring at ourselves in the mirror, convincing ourselves we’re our own worst enemy. And that’s what he does so well. He battles with himself and leaves no room for any of us to possibly interject. When reading Crush, I feel as if I’m interrupting someone’s most inner thoughts. It’s better to just sit back and wonder while you read poetry like this.
I beg of you to pick up this book, it in a lot of ways changed my outlook on life. Love, desire, grief, terror, anxiety, guilt, and loneliness. All of those things have a place in Crush.
In the final part of the Foreword, Louise Gluck writes:
“Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible. By Higginson’s report, Emily Dickinson famously remarked, ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’
She should, in that remark have shamed forever the facile, the decorative, the easily consoling, the tame. She names, after all, the responses that suggest violent transformation, the overturning of complacency by peril.
In practice, this has meant that poets quote Dickinson and proceed to write poems form which will and caution and hunger to accommodate present taste have drained all authenticity and unnerving originality. Richard Siken, with the best poets of his impressive generation, has chosen to take Dickinson at her word. I had her reaction.”
Me too.