All I can really tell you at the moment is that I opened this book and found a friend. I should say something about the interconnected three act structure of the overall work, the spiraling themes that turn the reader like a dancer around a single point, and the way the last lines of the last poem land the whole collection, but I don't have it in me right now. So we pray (do we still pray?) that the attempt will count for something, that that alone might be enough.Īnyway, I've composed this review a few different times, and maybe I will be able to do it justice later. That we have failed and are failing and will keep on failing. Everyone I know is desperately building homes to be safe in, all the while knowing that it's not going to be enough. It is a raw, steady look at the onrushing horror of a world that repeatedly destroys any love, any life that it does not understand. Panic to me implies an overreaction, a loss of control in a situation that could still be saved. Louise Glück says in her introduction that this book is about panic, but I don't really feel that it is panic. It is in a lot of ways about that very thing. This little collection does not mind being a bleeding scrap pulled from a ruin. It has been so long since I found some scrap of something so good. Here I am, crawling out of the blazing wreckage of 2020 to bring my fellow survivors good news. Spacing is important here, but not so much that the loss completely destroys the poem.)

As far as I know the pre tag is still broken. The mystery is that there is something to keep the light To hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the lightĪs if you were the small room closed in glass The bedroom gone white, the astronomical light The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.

Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow Siken's Thousand and One Nights are told with a combination of ferocity and sentimentalism (in the best sense of this poor word), and he saves himself from the worst excesses of romanticism and expressionism by the use of a variety of directions.

It is no accident that the first poem is entitled Scheherezade. The structure of this book is the story, the story board even. Does it matter that the tumultous and turbulent loves told about in the book are same sex? Yes and no. The hypnotism of the lines, the density of the texts makes us complicit, and proves a queer sort of intimacy. But it is also about using form to discover what is important. They also seem to be the work of a master cinematographer.The book is of course about unrequited love, about the need for love, about the failure of love. They are so elegantly crafted they remind me of the beautiful strokes of paint of De Kooning or Frankenthaler. The long lines are merciless and perfect. Richard Siken's Crush is an amazing book.

Crush richard siken review