Little Beast

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1962)

In “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath builds a poem around the allure of violence. Like Siken’s “Little Beast,” Plath’s “Daddy” reveals a fascination with destruction. “Every woman adores a Fascist,” quips Plath’s controversial speaker. Her speaker is titillated by her father’s Nazi past and the atrocities attached to it. Death fascinates Plath’s speaker. She tries to kill herself to return to her daddy. Later on, she brags about killing her father and her husband. It’s as if Plath’s speaker is the boy with the handgun in Siken’s poem.

“After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade” by Dennis Cooper (2000)

Dennis Cooper is a novelist and a poet. Like “Little Beast” and the other poems in Crush, Cooper’s works explore the violence and destruction of desire—particularly, gay desire. In “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade,” the speaker and his friends gaze at the football players as if they’re watching beautiful animals. They dream of one of the players approaching them and sinking his long teeth into their necks. Death doesn’t diminish desire in Cooper’s poem. A car hits and kills one of the football players, and the speaker says the dead body is “sexy.