Crush

'A spectacular comeback' Jeremy Noel Tod, Prospect'Siken's signature intensity still throbs between sentences' The Yale ReviewA collection of pitch-perfect prose poems written in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic stroke. From the author of cult poetry bestseller, Crush.Richard Siken's Crush was an underground international sensation. Twenty years on, he returns with the momentous I Do Know Some Things, cinematic in its tragic vision and emotive force.In the aftermath of a stroke, the poet's language and much of his memory is, for a time, wiped out. As his mind gropes its way back from oblivion, the scenery flickers between memories of a ruptured childhood and queer coming-of-age, and the precipice of the present. Each poem is a room in a 'house owned by ghosts'.In these seventy-seven prose poems, Siken has forged a new voice at once terrifying and vital. Brave in content and in method, I Do Know Some Things demands his recognition as an essential poet of our times.'Thrums with reinvention: of the self, of the prose poem, of the false divide between the everyday and the surreal' Andrew McMillanPraise for Crush:'Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power' Louise Glück'The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated' Ocean Vuong

"This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you."-NPR.org"Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."—Huffington PostIn reviewing Richard Siken's first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that "his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse." In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention."Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read."—Library Journal, starred review"[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create."—Vanity Fair"Siken's stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art."—Booklist“Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken's sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency."—Publishers Weekly"War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken's first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases—the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion."—The RumpusThe MuseumTwo lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.He saw a painting and stood in front of itfor too long. It was a few minutes before sherealized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck lookingat a painting. She stood next to him, looking at hisface and then the face in the painting. What do yousee? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn'tknow. She was disappointed, then bored. He waslooking at a face and she was looking at her watch.This is where everything changed . . .Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.