Richard Siken's Crush is urgent, its voice an aggressive invasion. From the first sentence of his first poem, the reader engages death, love, and longing. "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again" (3). There are no subtleties here, only language that literally forces the reader to engage the writing and the beauty of the rhythm on the page. It is in this language and rhythm that Siken develops a very tight and eloquent structure.
Siken's voice is consistent throughout the collection - at times raw, uninhibited, escaping the clothed bitter aftertaste of conventional language and in other parts soft, rhythmic, alliterative, and safe. "The Dislocated Room" is crafted in just such a manner. It begins on a beautiful evening where it would seem all is at peace:
It was night for many miles and then the real stars in the purple sky,
like little boats rowed out too far,
begin to disappear.
And there, in the distance, not the promised land,
but a Holiday Inn.
(46)
But the dislocation begins. The reader quickly peels back the layers of the poem and finds something sinister and raw in a Holiday Inn somewhere, anywhere in America.
This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the
space between
one note and the next, the part where you confuse
his hand with the room, the dog
with the man, the blood
with the ripped up sky.
He puts his hands all over you to keep you in the room.
( 47)
The sky is no longer purple with stars "like little boats rowed out too far" but violated, filthy, stained.
Yet, what still pulls the reader further inside the poetry is Siken's use of "you". We feel a part. It's as if an anonymous ghost haunts the page and Siken continually addresses it. We welcome this ghost and, eventually, feel that when Siken uses "you" he is speaking directly to us, the reader.
In "Boot Theory", for example, Siken uses repetition to provide a certain structure. "A man walks into a bar and says:" (20). These are simple words, simple declarative statements, but what follows, explores, crosses boundaries, creates an invasion of sorts, and seeks to develop the ghostly "you".
You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,
and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you
and he keeps kicking you.
You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don't work.
Boots continue to fall to the floor
in the apartment above you.
(20)
It isn't the repetition of "A man walks into a bar and says" that is attractive about this particular poem, but rather the repetition of "you" because it allows the reader to walk into the poetry and become its words. Towards the end, the man in the bar becomes "you" and the transition completes itself - the reader sees a man in a bar, "you" take him home, but then eventually "you" become him, sad and alone. The eloquence is in the fact that the repetition gives the reader an attachment and forces them to react emotionally to Siken's poetry.
Crush, then, is a gripping portrayal of what can happen when a poet unclothes, determined to write not for audience approval, but for the sake of expression, voice, and self. It is because of this nakedness that the reader reacts emotionally to the text, draws meaning from this aggressive invasion of the psyche and walks away feeling they have experienced a beautiful violation.
