In Richard Siken's collection, "Crush,"
which former Poet Laureate Louise Glück selected
for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004,
objects and events take on the weight of multiple meanings
and continue their plummeting course.
Demands weigh urgently on the speaker and the addressee.
Emotions arise both from the experiences being rendered
and from the repeated act of telling them.
In the forays of Siken's long lines
that stretch across and split down the page,
the staging of relationships becomes a crucial subject
as poems are engaged in the work of filming actions over them.
Through all this, a given atmosphere
pervades Siken's work.
That atmosphere seems both warm and wry, inclusive
of courthouse lawns, motel bougainvillea, waxed floors,
and greasy windows.
"Crush" is filled with light that streams, and splinters,
and possesses, astronomical light pummeling
you in a stream of fists.
Holding things up to the light--
a bullet, a bar soap.
The images negotiate intimacy and a sense
of resting distance, as in the long poem, "You Are Jeff."
The poet renders the wrench that once thrown catches the light
and hangs in the air, offering the notion that God
is the space between two men, and the devil
is the space between two men.
In addition to receiving the Yale award,
"Crush" was also a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award, the LAMBDA Literary Award, and the Thom
Gunn Award.
Siken has received a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission
on the Arts Grants, and a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He is co-founder and editor of the literary magazine, "Spork."
His poems have appeared in such journals
as The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, and Forklift
Ohio, and his poems are also anthologized
in The Best American Poetry 2000, and the recently
published "Legitimate Dangers."
Siken was born in New York City and raised
in Arizona, where he received an MFA in poetry
from the University of Arizona.
I am pleased to introduce Richard Siken.
[APPLAUSE]