Finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry.--Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

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. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness of Siken's poems. She notes, Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.

This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.--NPR.org

In 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 Rumpus

The Museum

Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.
He saw a painting and stood in front of it
for too long. It was a few minutes before she
realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking
at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his
face and then the face in the painting. What do you
see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't
know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was
looking 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.

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.

The long-anticipated third collection from the revered Richard Siken delivers his most personal and introspective collection yet.

Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself--the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move.... Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won't connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged. To say black tree when one means night.Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. Part insight, part anecdote, he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in The field [that] had been swept clean of habit.

One of the best books of contemporary poetry.--Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope.--Library Journal (Best Poetry of 2005)

Selected by Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Gl ck as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Richard Siken's Crush is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.

In her introduction to the book, Gl ck hails the cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, and] purgatorial recklessness of Siken's poems. She notes, Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.