Review of ​Crush by Richard Siken

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5