**2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist**
It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
ISBN: 9781556596247
Format: Hardcover
Real Estate
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse.When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter Motherfucker under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. That man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after the funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it, I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.
Reviews
“An absolute feat that Siken creates such a compelling and wide-ranging book from the single form. . . . Siken is certainly not the same as before [his stroke], but the changes are hard-earned. The work here is shown. The thread was lost, or cut, then woven back together by the poet’s own grit and love for the medium. He could not go on and yet here he is, going on.” —C. Francis Fisher, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The second-person strategies of Crush are abandoned in I Do Know Some Things for a more direct style, but Siken’s signature intensity still throbs between sentences. . . . Siken’s prose is often deft and exciting. As he relearned everything, the prose poem helped him rediscover how to create poetic tension, how to be dynamic without the gravity-defying magic of enjambment. . . . It is another way of not losing oneself, of not falling through the cracks.” —Richie Hoffman, Yale Review
“An astonishing feat of poetic prowess. . . . Siken has created ‘an encyclopedia of myself,’ a kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals—at times revels—in the faultiness of our own narratives. Siken’s voice—and language—is both rooted and aloft, even as he avers that these are not ‘poems of song.'” —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books
“If Hollywood ever takes an interest in 21st-century American poetry, my money would be on the life and work of Richard Siken. . . . I Do Know Some Things is a sequence of 77 one-paragraph prose poems which flash through a personal saga of such relentless intensity that it feels as likely to win an Oscar as a Pulitzer. . . . Siken is a deadpan virtuoso of the wrongfooting observation, his prose flickering between confessions as he remembers the frightening poetry of pure confusion.” —Jeremy Noel-Tod, Prospect Magazine