**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
“This is brutal work, sometimes frightening in its handling of aging and death — life as damage — and the struggle to recover one’s body, mind and self after crisis. Siken is also interrogating selfhood as a long artful project, a mode of defense, an act of deceit. . . . This book can be bleak, but also magical (.Below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. I fell in all directions’) and funny in a Glückian way—a one-syllable laugh in the devil’s face. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ he writes, ‘I’ll never forgive you.'”—Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, “Best Poetry of 2025”
“Each book is an opportunity to respond to the writer’s cardinal question: How to put it? Siken’s latest poetry collection, an autobiography in fragments, offers one answer, such as it is: back together. After a stroke in 2019, Siken abandoned the deft enjambments of his earlier work (including a debut, Crush, that received the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize and has since been passed around by countless writers like a totem). The 77 prose poems in this book reckon with love and memory and personal connection, but most of all with language and its loss. ‘There were few nouns. They wouldn’t connect,’ Siken writes in one poem. In another: ‘I tried to say it completely. I said it as plain as I could.'”—John Maher, New York Times, “Favorite Hidden Gem Books of 2025”
“One of the most striking aspects of I Do Know Some Things is its form. The tight prose blocks are unfamiliar to anyone expecting the libidinal and languorous errancy of Crush, or the dizzying descriptive wanderlust of War of the Foxes. There is a powerful constriction here, as if Siken wants readers to witness him journeying back to his body.”—Raquel Gutiérrez, Poetry Foundation
“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
“Abandoning traditional line breaks, Siken lets the text unfurl in dense prose blocks that mirror the fractured cognition and halted speech of his recovery. The result is a raw, autobiographical reckoning with childhood trauma, loss, and the fragility of the body, delivered in a stark and unornamented voice.”—Electric Lit, Best Poetry Collections of 2025
“It’s no exaggeration to call this book ‘long awaited.’ I Do Know Some Things consists of 77 prose poems, and no matter what story each one tells about the poet’s complex life and ruminations, it nearly always begins with a memorable first sentence. . . . The biggest narrative through-line concerns the misdiagnosis of a stroke Siken suffered as a panic attack, and the inevitable complications that follow. Yet whatever happens, Siken maintains not only an astonishingly clear recall of the details but also a saving sense of irony.”—David Starkey, California 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
“Regardless of the style, Siken maintains a confessional approach: Driving all his work is the urge to externalize something suppressed—in Crush, through a frenzied release of emotion and longing, and in I Do Know Some Things, through logic and order as a means of accessing a disorienting period in his life. . . . Siken’s insistence that all you need to know about him is there in his verse may once have seemed like a writer’s prideful comeback, but in I Do Know Some Things he has made it true, as he relinquishes control over the inner life he once so closely guarded.”—Yvonne Kim, Nation
“Moving, dense, and rich with recollections, woven masterfully with threads of his past, his recovery, and more lyrical pieces that seem to come from parallel universes he visited or dreams he had while in the initial days and weeks of recovery.”—Ciara Shuttleworth, UCLA Radiation Oncology Journal
“In this heartfelt, asynchronous, and beautifully strange chronicle of his stroke and its aftermath, he illuminates the labyrinths of memory, selfhood, and time. And we’re all brighter for it.”—Christopher Nelson, Under a Warm Green Linden