<div><div>Richard Siken&#8217;s <i>Crush</i>, selected as this year&#8217;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.<br><br>In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Gl&#252;ck hails the &#8220;cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness&#8221; of Siken&#8217;s poems. She notes, &#8220;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.&#8221;<br></div></div>