Ratings70
Average rating4.5
reliving the same tragedy over and over but each time never feels the same—the pain manifests itself differently with each recollection. the repeating images—a gun on the table, a pharmacy of light, a chlorinated pool—it's as if he were taking a memory at different stages of grief and analyzing it over and over, trying to piece together the different angles, the inconsistencies, the open ends, trying to make sense of it all.
one drawback is not necessarily a flaw but a significant feature of the works; it feels...rather youthful? i say this as a kid in their early 20s but the intensity and the obsession with which siken writes, it feels like reading through the emotions of someone my age, how exaggerated and overblown it seems but only in hindsight. however since i am young i love it. i love and i relate to the total desperation of the pieces featured here.
whenever i revisit this collection i always find something new to love. i feel like i will never find anything that affects me as much as crush (though hieu minh nguyen's “not here” comes especially close).
thank you richarn siken you're the best this book is literally me.. unfortunately i've lost all the citations i wrote down from it so i'm going to have to reread (not complaining, i am smmiling like this :D )
10.0
Took me 13 days to read these few 60 pages: Extremely dense reading. I would read a few poems before stopping and only picking it up days later. “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” is my favorite.
it doesn't get the 5 stars only bc wotf is better and i know this is an unpopular opinion but does it look like i care
(5th reread: kinda wanna give it 5 stars cause its SO GOOD but wotf still better brrr)
Favorites: • “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” • “Visible World” • “I Had a Dream About You” • “You Are Jeff”
???Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.???
i know this book took me a long time for how few pages it has but that was mainly because was cherishing every line and i didn't want to rush any moment of it.
i'd read short bits of richard siken before but honestly this was such an experience. this book tells a story and i'll probably read it again all in one sitting to feel what that's like. but this, this is the kind of poetry that really gets to me. siken's poetry tells me a story and it hits me with its metaphors and sensations in every line. i'm not sure how weird this is to say but his poetry is very sensory? i can feel and taste and smell it while reading it, every poem like a small (or large) multidimensional film experience. it makes me want to try to catch it in images even though i know i won't be able to.
i'm sure i did not understand parts of this and i'm sure i can go back a hundred times and find new things and change my interpretations and just knowing that that's what's ahead? amazing.
some of my favourite lines (emphasis on some because i can't possibly name all of them):
??? ???I want more seats reserved for heroes.?????? ???The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.?????? ???In these dreams it's always you: the boy in the sweatshirt, the boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.?????? ???Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can't go through with it. I just don't want to die anymore.???
This seizes me by the neck and forces me to admit how terrifying it feels to be in love, how the fear grows with the love until it becomes an obsession as well.
It forces me to admit that love often becomes a cycle of hurting and being hurt and then makes me laugh at myself for not even wanting to end that cycle. "I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it."
It makes me love being in love when I almost forget how to.
I kept repeating to myself while reading it - I don't even like poetry! I generally don't understand it and I see nothing great about it. But this thing... It really got to me. Incredibly powerful images, full of raw emotion and incredible depth. I fell in love with it.