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Richard siken crush poem
Richard siken crush poem






richard siken crush poem richard siken crush poem

There are juxtapositions of time, “It’s night. Somewhere there is projector throwing vignettes of whiskey, sex, and skin but also swimming pools, barbeques, and a radios playing all night long. More harrowing, the images Siken evokes are movie-like, perhaps easy to conjure. There is an implicit corruption within the poems that provokes the reader to fill in the blanks (“Tell me about the dream…”). How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running / until they forget they are horses.” As the poems in this collection tend to self-destruction and negate at their own accord, consuming Siken’s poetry is akin to a religious act, and the immaculate responsibility is placed in the hands of the reader.Ĭonsider the first poem of the collection, “Sheherazade”: “Tell me about the dream where we pull bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again. If to read poems that move past the story form into the crippling beyond of human indictment is to bear witness, then to analyze and speak of them is to give testimony. A narrative set of poems can sometimes, quite literally, hang together by a single, narrow (sometimes pointless) thread. The poems must command a lyrical space while tying up loose ends. Reading poetry that breathes like a story can be a challenge. Such difficulty is, in itself, praise of the work.”

richard siken crush poem

The last page of Louise Glück’s introduction to Richard Siken’s Crush succinctly phrases the problem of recounting Siken’s magnetizing, operatic work: “In other ways, this introduction has been difficult because of the poems’ interconnectedness, the temptation has been to quote everything.








Richard siken crush poem