Richard Siken You know, I’ve dodged this question (or answered it dishonestly) so many times now, but I’ll go ahead and attempt an explanation. Legacy Russell So, Richard, I’m just going to put it out there-while your work can be found on a myriad of blogs, online journals, and a variety of publications, and while selections from Crush have been read on YouTube by aspiring poets, tattooed on people’s bodies, and passed around a far-reaching literary community as a publication that has been rumored to change people’s lives, you’ve been relatively private about your identity as a writer. Six years later, Siken’s bite still draws blood, and it feels good.
His reply: “It is cliché as fuck.” Thus began a war of words. In my final year of school, knee-deep in my own studies of poetry and art, I decided to write Siken: “It’s cliché as fuck to write a note like this. Crush lived with me for years during this time I lost copies left and right to friends and colleagues who borrowed mine without realizing how difficult it would become to part with it once immersed in the undertow of Siken’s text. I sat down on the floor and read the sixty-two-page work from cover to cover several hours later, sick to my stomach, I brought it home with me. Her first sentence: “This is a book about panic.” Second: “The word is never mentioned.” My knees buckled.
Published that year as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the venerable Louise Glück had written the foreword. In 2005, I happened upon a copy of Richard Siken’s Crush while browsing at Saint Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village.
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