Alex Lemon
REVIEW
Richard Siken. Crush. Yale University Press.
Louis Glück should be commended, and Richard Siken needs to be watched. Crush, selected by series editor Glück as winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, is a collection of unrelenting intensity, filled with viscerally imagistic poems that handcuff you to the bedposts in this bordello—where you’re riveted to all your favorite lust-soaked casualties. As in “Little Beast,” where “The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night / is thinking. It’s thinking of love. / It’s thinking of stabbing us to death / and leaving our bodies in the dumpster”, [5] or the final lines of “Saying Your Names” where in a Frankensteinish Eros we are given—
my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can’t go through with it.
I just don’t want to die anymore.
[36]
Siken consistently utilizes filmic metaphor and language. This, combined with his director-voiced-use of the second person spike these poems with a haunting intimacy. The lives these poems inhabit have been spliced, fast-forwarded, and injected with dream narratives that make Crush a macabre version of Groundhog Day—or similar in its red-lining, temporal-evisceration as the Christopher Nolan film Memento.
You are on your back in your undershirt, a broken man
on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains
on the ceiling.
And you can hear the man in the apartment above you
taking off his shoes.
You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,
you’re waiting
because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be
some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together
but here we are in the weeds again,
here we are
In the bowels of the things: your world doesn’t make sense.
And then the second boot falls.
And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.
“Boot Theory” [20]
But in almost all my favorite movies there are tainted scenes in which an extra stares directly into the camera or a lead actor’s fly is half way down, and Crush is no exception. The noir backdrop to Siken’s book is not subtle—the blood and love, the guns and booze—and there are times when Crush doesn’t deliver the beautiful dread it so often seeks out and achieves. Most of these poems have a tooth-sharpened sorrow, but occasionally they dip into a pathos that detracts from the cumulative power of Crush.
In “Wishbone,” for example, “There is a bottle of whiskey in the truck of the Chevy and a / dead man at our feet / staring up at us like we’re something interesting.” I want this dead man’s look to be interesting. But the true excellence of Siken’s poetics is that he can erase these lines from our memory with the poem’s staggering finale:
This is where the evening
Splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard
And make a wish.
[41]
Siken has stirred a potent cocktail in Crush. Equal parts sex and loss, these poems are shaken into a clamor of dashing lists and obsessions that, when at their best, reach a spellbinding and ill-fated immediacy, where—
You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.
You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do
long division,
and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless
he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you
didn’t do,
because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Primer for the Small Weird Loves“ [22]
There is an inevitability and a exquisiteness to this terror —a brilliance that must be felt, as in the synesthesia of Siken’s “Driving Not Washing” where “They’re hurling their bodies down the freeway / to the smell of gasoline, / which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so.” [43]
Glück has selected a harrowing and remarkable book, one that reminds us
We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
My silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
“Snow and Dirty Rain” [62]
and by bruising us with the pleasures in Crush, Siken has delivered a first-rate debut.
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