One book I keep returning to is Richard Sikens Crush. . . . The poems are vivid, heaving things, stuffed with obsession and surprises. . . . The poems arent comforting, but theyre invigorating. This is a book about thrashing around in the great big world, being messy, being alive.Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times Book Review
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
Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [ Sikens] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)
A powerful collection of poems . . . at once confessional, gay, savage, and charged with a violent eroticism.Forecast
Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2005 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, sponsored by The Publishing Triangle
Crush is a wondrous, brilliant book. Richard Sikens 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.Dennis Cooper