Richard Siken's Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004, is driven by obsession and love--confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. Nobel Prize laureate and competition judge Louise Glück hailed the "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness" of Siken's poems. "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."

Since its publication, Crush has become a modern classic. It is one of the books most often read by young poets, and it is frequently taught and assigned. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.