Richard Siken's Crush, selected as this year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck 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.

Visible World

Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow

flat on the wall.

The dawn was breaking the bones of your

heart like twigs.

You had not expected this,

the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light

pummeling you in a stream of fists.

You raised your hand to your face as if

to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the

light

streams straight to the bone,

as if you were the small room closed in glass

with every speck of dust illuminated.

The light is no mystery,

the mystery is that there is something to keep

the light

from passing through

Richard Siken's Crush, selected as this year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.

In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gluck 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.

Announcing the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, North America's oldest annual literary prize.