The Return of Richard Siken

A few years after Richard Siken published his 2005 debut poetry collection, Crush, a teenager e-mailed him asking for help on a school assignment. She was required to reach out to a living writer, and she asked for 18 facts about his life that would help her understand his work. Siken wrote back saying that if she needed biographical details to feel his poems, then they “were a failure and I had wasted my life.”