If you're in New Haven on Friday, May 2nd, drop by the Whitney Humanities Center at 53 Wall St. to hear some recent younger poets read from their work. View Larger Map

We've just put up five poems from Crush with more to come. Read and comment on them here. A few words from Louise Glück's Foreword to the book for those unfamiliar with Richard Siken's work: We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, [...]

I'm pleased to report that Richard Siken—the Yale Younger Poet whose amazing book Crush was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award a couple of years back—will be participating in this project. We'll be starting with several poems from his book, including "I am Jeff," and move on from there.

We want poetry to be a big part of this. Louise Glück, the current editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has said that Jay Hopler's book is "filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long [...]