Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

Look at the light through the windowpane. Were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple How we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days It’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running Take, for example, his lead poem, “Scheherazade”: Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake Siken takes keen advantage of the fragmented structure of poetry, where the fits and starts of thought and meaning add up to much more than if the author ever tried to explain himself in full. He effectively juxtaposes holy wishes with mundane images-making them both seem beautiful by some strange lyrical alchemy-throwing love in with the sock drawer. With sophisticated wordplay and provocative shifts between first and second person, Siken expresses a frustration with earthbound details and bodily confinement. Siken’s debut collection, 15 years in the making, hurls the reader into a world of nerve-wracked love-relationships haunted by obsession and futility-expressed with such eloquence as to make the pain of it strangely alluring. With a single book, then, Siken has achieved more than many writers do in the span of a career. These are two of the highest honors in the poetry world. Crush, chosen by former poet laureate Louise Glück in 2004 for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize, was also recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. The 39-year-old poet is wise to be considering his options. “If you think that life is brutal and short, then the book is uplifting. “If you think the world is a golden place made out of love, then the book is ‘grim,’” he countered when I used the adjective to describe the despair and murderous images that appear in his poetry. He is leaping forth in conversation when the words, or the meanings they offer, seem off mark.

He is thinking about a different life, one with a community of writers and conversations about language, perhaps as a teacher at a university. He is talking about a new kind of poetry, more optimistic and compassionate, moving forward from the insistent sadness of his first book, Crush. Richard Siken is poised and ready to pounce.

Siken richard