Crush by Richard Siken (2005)
- Abby Kernya
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
by Abbigale Kernya, for The 44 North
Managing Editor
Genre: Poetry, Queer Lit
Recommended Age: 14+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 3/5
Positive message: 2/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 4/5
Sex: 5/5
Language: 3/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 2/5
“I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.”
—Richard Siken, Crush
I have been going through a very weird time in my life. From attempting to navigate friendship, romance, and that weird, unspoken tether between them—the past months have been a time of great transformation.
I am not the first person to say that love is a tricky thing and I certainly am not the first person to grieve in the most romantic of ways. Famously, however, I am perhaps the biggest yearner I have ever met and I have never gotten over anything ever. I am, at the end of the day, a melancholic drama queen who will linger in melodrama as long as I can to fuel my “creative process”
This said creative process is brought on by my set rotation of books that bounce me back into the lesson of heartbreak, loneliness, fear, and everything in between.
Richard Siken is on my rotation twice.
The first being his sophomore poetry collection titled War of the Foxes which I’m sure will make an appearance on this page sooner than later if not tattooed on myself first. Yet, nothing compares to my first exposure to Siken which remains stapled to my brain even a year later.
Crush is Siken’s arguably most famous poetry collection—winning the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize and having made rounds on social media for its beautifully articulated poems detailing the crawl from obsession, to love, back to obsession again.
Though I have read this book multiple times over and marked up nearly every page in pen, it gained a new meaning for me recently as I became harrowingly aware of how intimate Siken’s writing is.
At the beginning of my current relationship, my partner asked to borrow Crush to better understand me and get a sense of the literature I love. When I lent him my copy, I immediately felt its absence on my shelf, and realized how much of myself Siken managed to touch with his words, and just how frightening that kind of intimacy really is.
Siken’s short poems manage to uncover the anxiety of falling in love; he argues that love is survival, if nothing else. This survival is the endurance to give yourself wholly to another with the knowledge that you will never entirely get yourself back—at least not in a way you remember.
Crush is heartbreaking and encouraging and utterly devastating. Love has no answer, but it does have a universal understanding of this fact that there is no right way to navigate it. One can only give in to it, or let oneself be destroyed by its gnashing teeth. Siken writes about love as a young queer adult trying to find himself in the bodies of others—biting his bloodied tongue over and over when a crush threatens to overthrow him; when love turns sour.
Crush is one of those books that I turn to in different stages of my life to see how I’ve grown, but also to see how it speaks to me in a new, intimate way. I read Crush in the middle of heartbreak, loneliness, and now again in a loving relationship.
It is one of those books that holds infinite meaning—one that no matter where your life takes you and who you spend it with, that feeling of isolation and confusion that haunts your twenties will always find its way back to you; not always in a bad way, however.
In Crush, Siken makes a place for remembrance. A place to be as horrified by love as much as it excited you.
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