Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

In fact, I normally avoid trying to grasp the meaning behind every single line – “a good poem understands itself”, as Emily Berry put it in an interview for Chicago Review of Books.Besides, with contemporary poetry, I’m trying my best to enjoy the ride and genuinely have a good time.

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for. A poetry collection inconsolable of its particular homosexual aching and desire, Crush grinds words into a cup of caffeine-infused affection. In her introduction to the book, Gluck hails the cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness of Siken's poems.In the foreword to Crush, competition judge Louise Glück wrote that the poems contained "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness", and that "Books of this kind dream big [. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. and it isn't that I am adverse to imagery of blood, bones, death, gravel rocks and roads, bruises and ruin, etc.