Every once in a while a book comes along that rocks our poetic world. Richard Siken's debut collection of poems, Crush, is proving to be one such book. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Crush has been wowing literati since its April 2005 release. And it's no surprise: Siken's arresting visual imagery reads more like cinema than scene, gracefully employing the second-person to position the reader as both voyeur and subject: implicated, a co-star. The effect is exhilarating and unsettling, as in "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves":

               The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, sees you
as a piece of real estate,
                          just another fallow field lying underneath him
                                                                  like a sacrifice.
               He's turning your back into a table so he doesn't have to
                            eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable,
pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself
                                                                                               inside you.

His poems pulsate with queer eroticism, challenging the reader's expectations of memory and fantasy, death and desire at every turn:

We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me
                          spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
                                                                                              right out of my mouth.
You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

Much of this collection deals frankly with these seemingly competing impulses. But just as often, readers are confronted with what remains unsaid:

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
                                        I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
                                                                                 Crossed out.
               Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
                           Crossed out.

In the face of this silencing, "these erasures," it is clear that when the poems speak, it is because of an urgent need to speak. In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück describes this urgency as "panic". And panicked it might be; constantly present is the threat of violence, the inevitability of loss, a clear line delineating what must never be uttered. But the poems cross that line, giving one the sense of getting away with something revolutionary, something tragic and fine.

Richard Siken's Crush dazzles as it undulates between order and chaos, lyric and the avant-garde. It is a book that inhabits a powerful, politically-charged space, one which displaces us from our comfort zone, and confronts us with the very nature our discomfort. "We do not want the screen /completely/ lifted from our eyes", the poems tell us. But Siken does lift it and the result is a collection so breathtaking that it borders on apocalyptic. We're crushed, inconsolable, left wanting more.