It’s a collection I loved and which helped expose me to the kind of vitality and awe and hurt that language is capable of expressing when I was first starting to figure out what it meant for me to write things about my own hurts and fears. For many poets, “Crush” holds the kind of mythic power that immortalizes without ever waning in wonder. At school, the book was passed around among friends, discussed in the hushed hallways amidst ongoing classes, on the grass at lunch, with our teachers in English class.
At nearly every writing camp I attended during high school, “Crush” was referenced and quoted and revered by the teenaged poets around me. Others all around me believed it too, it seemed.
As Louise Glück writes in the opening sentence of the poem forward, “This is a book about panic.” The kind of panic that drove Siken’s poetry held an urgency which I had never seen before, and although I was 14 and had never experienced real heartbreak, I felt that the world had been opened, and within its thin paper walls I had discovered why I loved poetry: The expression of emotions and experiences so intensely overwhelming, poetry was the only possible receptacle that would not lead to total self-destruction. We were assigned to read “Little Beast,” the third poem in the book, and, with an intensity more heightened than with any poetry I’d ever read before, I felt so completely consumed by the poem’s world that I almost believed I had been in, and destroyed by, love. I had first read the Yale Series of Younger Poets’ winning collection at a writing program when I was 14. In my last poetry class, we closed out the quarter by reading “Crush” by Richard Siken.
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