Richard Siken’s poetry is daring in its construction, graceful yet startling in its beauty, and complicit with emotions and states of mind that would have remained unintelligible without him. Winner of the 2005 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, sponsored by The Publishing Triangle at once confessional, gay, savage, and charged with a violent eroticism.'- Forecastįinalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry 'Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.'- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) Recommended for all collections.'- Library Journal This book will excite patrons and be long remembered. 'Siken’s debut collection derives its energy from the friction among bodies, selves, and lovers. His second book of poems, War of the Foxes, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.

He is the author of the collection Crush (Yale University Press, 2005), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2004. 'Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.'- Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005) Richard Siken (born February 15, 1967) is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker.

In the foreword to Crush, competition judge Louise Glück wrote that the poems contained 'cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, purgatorial recklessness', and that 'Books of this kind dream big They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.'Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry.'-Victoria Chang, Huffington Post The Huffington Post's Victoria Chang praises the poet for writing with a 'cinematic brilliance and urgency'. In Louise Glück's review of the poem, she makes the following observation, 'Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. It positions the reader as an accomplice to its dealings. The opening poem, Scheherazade (the title references to the character from One Thousand and One Nights) intimates inevitability and is foreboding in its tone. It is said that Siken's main inspiration was the death of his boyfriend in the early 1990s. The collection of poems contemplate infatuation, intimacy, loss, and grief. It was selected as the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition by Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Crush is the debut collection of poetry by American poet Richard Siken.

Richard siken