How long does it take to read Crush?
Crush by Richard Siken takes about 1 hour 28 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 28 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2004. 80 pages, about 22,000 words.
3 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 2 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 28 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 55 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Richard Siken's Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. 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."
Subjects: Poetry, American poetry, Poetry (poetic works by one author), LGBT poetry, LGBTQ poetry, Lambda Literary Awards