On Crush

This is a reasonable set of poems, mostly about power relations, masculinity, and loneliness. Siken is a gay man, and that looms large over all of them — a refreshing corrective to the way masculinity usually gets discussed in cross-gender terms, though at this point LGBT perspectives are essentially mainstream. In the end I just wasn’t that impressed. I picked it up because I’d heard that his War of the Foxes is a successor to it and that the later book is very good; I figured I’d start here, though I’m not sure that was necessary.