Annal:2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Yale Younger Poets Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Younger Poets winner
- 2005 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.54
Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.
In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “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.”
