They were used so often, though, and I think any edge that initially came from them was lost when they became familiar from repetition.

Whilst it also traverses realisations and remembrances throughout the complications of same sex attraction, it is insatiably hungry for love and the many faces it dons. The opening poem, Scheherazade (the title references to the character from One Thousand and One Nights) intimates inevitability and is foreboding in its tone. I think what really bothers me about the book is the lack of modulation in the narrator's obsessions, mood, and tone.The form of the poems in this collection felt like a cop-out: you can only splatter lines across a page so many times before I become suspicious that your form isn't serving the poem, you're just doing it because you can't seem to do anything else successfully. Unless you are a brilliant, brilliant poet, I don't want to read a whole collection of your poems that are set in a forest or come out of a panic or pine endlessly after a lover. It's Uncle Jeff, who isn't really your uncle, but you can't talk right now, one of the Jeffs has put his tongue in your mouth. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. This is just one of those books that you can read all the way through and, the next day, not remember more than a handful of images or lines because there is too much junk crowding the beauty out.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it. After the first few poems it lost me until the second to last poem which I liked in a weird-dream-sequence kind of way, but even that dragged on just a little too long. Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? The repetition of pacing and break builds on the down tempo into a culminating panic under the weight of body and the gravity of obsessive love.The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. If you are a GR friend of mine, I have probably already sent you a poem (or 2, or 3) from this book as I've taken my time to read through it. What's left are the raw emotions of the actual experience, which is what great poetry is: distilling the massive events that make up a life until there's nothing left but the urgent parts, the ones that carry the meaning.

I also thought his endings consistently flopped: almost half the poems end with some form of repetition (either direct or implied).Images are repeated again and again with only slight variations (driving on the road, running out onto the road, lying in the road).

You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gl ck hails the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. It’s painful, but it’s a delicious pain, glorious in love and lust and in being alternately strong and vulnerable.This one's language is easy to follow and the entire thing is comprehensive and you can really see the emotions and angst, but still, I couldn't find any deeper meanings in the poems.