In the foreword to Crush, competition judge Louise Glück wrote that the poems contained "cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, purgatorial recklessness", and that "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. The Huffington Post's Victoria Chang praises the poet for writing with a "cinematic brilliance and urgency". Siken’s first collection, Crush, embodies this frenzied energy with a scattered aesthetic, while the poems in his later collection, War of the Foxes, feel more settled. In Louise Glück's review of the poem, she makes the following observation, "Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. It positions the reader as an accomplice to its dealings.
The opening poem, Scheherazade (the title references to the character from One Thousand and One Nights) intimates inevitability and is foreboding in its tone. It is said that Siken's main inspiration was the death of his boyfriend in the early 1990s.
The collection of poems contemplate infatuation, intimacy, loss, and grief. It was selected as the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition by Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Crush is the debut collection of poetry by American poet Richard Siken.
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