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Remix Redux!
Richard Siken, Crush: Siken’s Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out gets a reasonable amount of circulation in my circles, and it’s a good example of Siken’s pained humor. (“I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon…. but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.”). Siken writes about the body, about the desperate imposition of sexual desire, about danger always lurking, about the desire to die. Louise Glück’s introduction is perfect, unsurprisingly: “This is a book about panic…. [T]he speaker is never outside it long enough to differentiate panic from other states. In the world of Crush, panic is a synonym for being: in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntac, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss.” There are a number of repeated images: bullets, blood, road trips, brothers, green-eyed lovers, and other obsessions of Americana. (“There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet/staring up at us like we’re something interesting.This is where the evening/splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”) Highly recommended, even though I don’t know how to write about poetry.
Richard Siken, Crush: Siken’s Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out gets a reasonable amount of circulation in my circles, and it’s a good example of Siken’s pained humor. (“I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon…. but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.”). Siken writes about the body, about the desperate imposition of sexual desire, about danger always lurking, about the desire to die. Louise Glück’s introduction is perfect, unsurprisingly: “This is a book about panic…. [T]he speaker is never outside it long enough to differentiate panic from other states. In the world of Crush, panic is a synonym for being: in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntac, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss.” There are a number of repeated images: bullets, blood, road trips, brothers, green-eyed lovers, and other obsessions of Americana. (“There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet/staring up at us like we’re something interesting.This is where the evening/splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”) Highly recommended, even though I don’t know how to write about poetry.