Richard Siken
Quick answer: Richard Siken craft guide: repetition, breathless syntax and cinematic montage in Crush and War of the Foxes, with practice advice for your own poems.
Few first books have gripped young poets like Crush. Richard Siken, born in 1967, won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize with it, selected by Louise Gluck, who described its panic and obsession in her foreword. Two decades on, the book circulates online with the fervour usually reserved for albums, and its long, breathless, looping love poems have been imitated by a generation, mostly badly, which tells you the technique is harder than it looks.
Siken is also a painter, and his second collection, War of the Foxes, from 2015, thinks constantly about paint, representation and what an image owes its subject. Between the two books you can study a rare thing: a poet whose signature style is fast, urgent and recursive, applied first to desire and then to art itself.
Obsession as engine
Crush is a book about wanting someone in a world that feels dangerous: car rides, motel rooms, dreams that keep restarting, a love repeatedly interrupted by violence real or imagined. Rather than describing obsession from outside, the poems reproduce its motion, circling, correcting themselves, starting the story over with the details changed.
War of the Foxes cools the temperature and moves the same restlessness into the painter's studio, asking what it means to make a picture of a bird, a man, a war. Read together, the books show a writer keeping his engine and changing his vehicle, a useful model for anyone afraid that developing means abandoning their voice.
The signature moves
Siken's style is built from visible, learnable mechanics.
How to use these moves without imitating them
Practise the on-stage correction: write a scene, then contradict one detail two stanzas later and keep going, letting the reader feel memory revising itself. It creates intimacy and unreliability at once. Build one long additive sentence per poem, stacking clauses past the point of comfort, then follow it with a short line; the contrast is where the voltage lives.
Use hard cuts deliberately. Draft your poem's scenes on separate lines, delete every transition, and reorder for collision rather than chronology. The caution: these techniques run hot, so anchor them with concrete nouns, cars, dishes, animals, or the poem becomes pure adrenaline with nothing to grip.
Where to start reading
Crush, obviously, and read it in order rather than sampling, since the poems answer each other. Well-known pieces to look for include Scheherazade, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, and the numbered sequence You Are Jeff. Then War of the Foxes, especially its poems about painting and portraiture, to watch the style mature.
What poets can take from this
- Retell one scene twice in the same poem with a detail changed, and do not explain the discrepancy.
- Write one sentence that runs at least eight lines on and, then cut to a three-word line.
- Delete every transition between your poem's scenes and reorder them for collision.
- Address an urgent you and never clarify who it is.
- Anchor high-speed emotion with at least five concrete nouns per poem.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that tells the story of one night three times: as it happened, as you wish it happened, and as you are afraid it happened, without labelling which version is which.
Questions
Why is Crush by Richard Siken so popular?
Its urgent, looping poems about desire, fear and obsession speak with unusual directness, and the style, long breathless sentences and cinematic cuts, is instantly recognisable. Selected by Louise Gluck for the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets, it has become a modern cult classic.
What is the difference between Crush and War of the Foxes?
Crush runs on romantic and bodily panic, while War of the Foxes, published in 2015, turns the same restless intelligence toward painting and the ethics of making images. The voice is continuous; the subject shifts.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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