Sontag continued on to write that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” As a culture whose prevailing sensibility is epitomized by the air quote, we have embraced camp so heartily that what started off as a symbol of the counterculture has fully permeated the mainstream. It’s more surprising that, in drawing up on the tropes of the genre, Siken created his own cult classic.Īccording to Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Notes on Camp” (1964), “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Given this definition, one might say that camp’s natural habitat is the stage (or, today, the cinema)-for the theater, as a space in which men costume and disguise their true selves to enact fictions before a complicit audience, has long been associated with duplicity and histrionics. It’s not surprising that, as a gay man coming of age in the post-Rocky Horror era, Siken chose to borrow images and rhetoric from the camp aesthetic. Crush is a book by a gay male poet that creates a vivid portrait of violent, BDSM-influenced male sexuality by thus flouting traditional social norms, Siken’s book lands firmly within the critical definition of a cult classic. “Has anyone ever told you to read Crush by Richard Siken?”įilm critics identify cult classics not only by a devoted fanbase, but also in large part by the transgressiveness and marginality of the content. “You know what you’d love? Crush by Richard Siken.” Scholars and poets also frequently describe their relationship to Siken in superlative terms: one writer included Siken on a list of poets who changed my life, while another poet writes that she “literally carried Crush everywhere I went for three or four years.” After a ten-day stint at a writers conference, no fewer than five poets directed me to Siken, his name coming off their lips with the same tenderness allotted to a lover: People who claim not to like poetry go out and buy Siken’s book after reading a single poem, which has likely been have blogged and re-blogged with a short introduction that asserts this is one of the blogger’s absolute favorite poems of all time.

It’s no coincidence that Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poet prize, can be described with the same vocabulary as an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: like the long-running series, Crush is a self-consciously campy work that has become a cult classic. Dread so palpable you can practically hear the slow creep of chords in the diminished fifth.

A back-alley stabbing at an innocent dance on a courthouse lawn.

Crush richard siken amazon