
The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. This went on for a long time.Ī man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone-solid, inevitable-but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.Ī man saw a bird and found him beautiful. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. His fans’ favorite lines are “bodies seized by light” and “love too will wreck.” 1. The Richard Siken poems address matters like love, life, and enduring in this world. In addition, he works as a social worker full-time and resides in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Siken has won a Pushcart Prize.

Yale University Press published crush in 2006 and earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 2004. 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.Most people are familiar with Richard Siken poems from his poetry collection “Crush.” In 2004, the poetry book took first place in the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.īlue Jupiter, War of the Foxes, and Crush are all written by Richard Siken. 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.
