The 18th annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, non-fiction, and poetry published in 2005, were presented last week in New York City. The Thomas Gunn Award for Gay Poetry went to Richard Siken’s Crush.

This is only the latest in the string of accolades Richard Siken has collected for the book, which was named the winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and one among the Spring 2006 Book Sense Picks Poetry Top Ten, based on the nominations of independent booksellers nationwide.

“‘Crush’ is a study of passion, and its effect is a seizure,” says a recent review of the book. “[T]he reading experience is all assault: love, desire, loss, the body, death and the incessant self. Nothing tames the fury of running to and from this story.”

Read two poems (in pdf format) from the book.