Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press, 2005), pbk, 80pp., $14.95.

 
     In “Personism: a Manifesto,” Frank O’Hara declares, “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, and if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.” Whether or not O’Hara’s tongue-in-cheek assessment is accurate or inclusive, I’d add Richard Siken to the list. His work is, for my money, much better than the movies.

     I’m not just saying this because of his use of arresting visual imagery, or his appropriation of cinematic language and technique as in “Dirty Valentine,” where he writes, “We’re filming the movie called Planet of Love—[…] There’s a part in the movie / where you can see right through the acting, / where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears, / right before I burst into tears / and flee to the slimy moonlit riverbed / canopied with devastated clouds.”  I’m saying this because virtually every poem in Crush is every bit as immediate, engaging, and absorptive as the best films; he holds the reader rapt, making it almost impossible to look away from the beautiful and troubling scenes he sets. 

     Chosen by former US Poet Laureate Louise Glück as the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush consistently uses filmic metaphor and genre elements to create fresh poems of love, obsession, sex, pain, and anxiety. There are elements of the cowboy movie—“It’s a Western, / Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard / out of the bone white scenario”—and elements of the noir, as in “Little Beast,” in which the hardboiled speaker proclaims, “But damn if there isn’t anything sexier / than a slender boy with a handgun / a fast car, a bottle of pills.” There are the desolate landscapes and sweeping vistas of the road movie—“It was night for many miles… And there, in the distance, not the promised land, / but a Holiday Inn, / with bougainvillea growing through chain link by the pool”—and the far-flung feats of the action flick: “I’m battling monsters, I’m pulling you out of burning buildings.” And, of course, there are comings of age:  

               The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater
because he is trying to kill you,
                and you deserve it, you do, and you know this
                                and you are ready to die in this swimming pool
because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means
                your life is over anyway.

     That said, cinematic as Siken’s poems are, so too are they much more. Although they are filmic and lovely to picture, his poetry is far from superficial or exclusively visual, hardly as dependent on pretty surfaces as many films ultimately reveal themselves to be. Unlike many admittedly enjoyable movies that you can see once and be satisfied, Siken’s work continues to yield long after the initial encounter. He deals deeply with concerns that at first seem opposite, but which eventually prove themselves to be inextricably intertwined: hope and despair, eros and thanatos, love and hate, resentment and forgiveness, pleasure and pain. In playing with these interconnected concepts, he plays with the reader’s expectations, as when he writes “We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor… / When I say this, it should mean laughter / not poison.” 

     Siken is a master at giving concrete bodies to ethereal abstractions, and although it would be fair to say that Crush is a rather dark collection, so too is it punctuated by moments of beauty and humor—beauty, as when he writes of “how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days / were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple / to slice into pieces,” and humor, as when he describes the dream scenario: 

     We were in the Safeway parking lot. I couldn’t find my cigarettes.
                                   You said Hurry up! but I was worried there would be a holdup
                and we would be stuck in a hostage situation, hiding behind
                                                                       the frozen meats, with nothing to smoke for hours.
                                 You said Don’t be silly,
                                                 so I followed you into the store.
                We were thumping the melons when I heard somebody say Nobody move!
                                                               I leaned over and whispered in your ear I told you so. 

In true Siken fashion, he follows this whimsy up by confessing, “These are the dreams we should be having. I shouldn’t have to / clean them up like this.” 

     In short, Siken’s breathtaking debut possesses all the ingredients of poet Charles Harper Webb’s formula for great poetry: wit, passion, and impropriety. Through his powerful use of the second person, Siken reaches out to you, the reader, pulls you into his picture show, makes you the reluctant star. By the end of the collection, you are left feeling implicated, participatory. As when he writes, “And the part where I push you / flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, / shut up / I’m getting to it,” he roughs you up, makes you imagine yourself involved. And you want it. You like it. You’re left wanting more.

— Kathleen Rooney