Richard Siken

Crush

Best-selling poet and painter Richard Siken uses strong, bold strokes to reveal a world abstract, concrete, and exquisitely complex.

War of the Foxes

Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets

Editors Pages

Blue Jupiters

War of the Foxes by Richard SikenPaperback

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the influential first poetry collection by Richard Siken An Atlantic choice for "Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)" Since winning the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush has become a modern classic. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.

Twentieth Anniversary Edition Volume 99

*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist* I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method. It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.

I Do Know Some Things

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush, the passionate and influential poetry collection by Richard Siken

Twentieth Anniversary Edition

'Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power' Louise Glück, from the Foreword to Crush I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method. It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one's life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns's shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths. 'The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated' Ocean Vuong

Richard Siken

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