I Do Know Some Things

by Richard Siken

*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist*

I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method.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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Disability, American, Contemporary

111 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 26, 2025

About the author

Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. His poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review and Forklift, Ohio, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000 and Legitimate Dangers. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

[Julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

i imagine this is how the beatles' groupies felt when a tour was announced lmao

[Affan · Rating 5 out of 5]

New poetry collection by Richard Siken??? God is alive and breathing.

[Vanessa Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m seated. the bookstore employees are scared and asking me to leave because it ‘hasn’t even started printing yet’ but i’m simply too seated.

[Ken]

According to Glyn Maxwell, that odd bodkin we call "prose poetry" can be defined in a few words: "A prose poem is prose done by a poet." In that case, the poet Richard Siken's latest outing is a collection of prose done by a poet."

Of course, I can play reindeer games, too. I could say this is as much a collection of vignettes as a collection of prose poems, reminiscent as it is of Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, though I'd say Cisneros' famous book is more poetic prose done by a poet than Siken's.

Still, there has to be something here. The award judges that be have put it up for a National Book Award in 2025, so there's that. And many of the poems deal with recovery from a stroke, reflecting what Richard Siken himself has gone through, so there's THAT, too.

In that sense, the work is very first-person personal, mixing glances at the past with stories of the journey back from a medical crisis. For a look-see, I give you this example of Siken's prose that's a poem that's prose (note that line breaks are not the same in order to fit into GR's margin restrictions):


Fauna

There is something wrong with the deer. It is not all right.
It has caught its leg in a length of something. They cut it
free and let it go but you can tell it is not all right. It might
never be all right. Call it a myth and the truth grows
abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a double fact.
My stepmother's father was an Elk. We would go to the
lodge to eat roast beef and watch him butt heads with
the other Elks. Sometimes he would raise a glass in praise
and we would clap. Sometimes he would remember and
we would bow our heads. The Elks fought in the war
to end tyranny. They left, they fought, and they came back.
They are not all right. Once, I drove to the end of the world.
It was in Los Angeles. Someone had posted a sign. It read
No U-turn. Parking $5. The beach was nice. I wrote
you a letter in case I died but I threw it away. It was good
practice. We have to practice losing everything. We are deer,
we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.


A nice pairing of the real deer in line 1 and the Elks members, both of whom are "not all right." No, something went wrong somewhere in both cases. Meanwhile, the speaker knows his Buddhism (whether he's aware of Buddhism or not): "We have to practice losing everything."

As was the case with Cisneros, I quite liked this. No, it wasn't an exact match in tone or spirit to that famous slim wonder, but it arrived somewhere on its own terms. And if Siken pulled it off post-stroke, all the more impressive.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, in truth.

This has been my most anticipated poetry release ever since it was announced. Siken is back, he’s playing in a new form, & it’s really, really working. In many ways, this feels like his most personal collection, even moreso than ‘Crush.’ It almost felt too intimate, like reading a diary.

My one critique would be that this felt just a tad long. There were a few poems that I thought could’ve probably been cut to get this under 100 pages without losing any of the narrative in the process. But, really, when we’ve waited so long for another Siken, it seems silly to ask for less.

Not the Siken I’d recommend if you’re new to his work, but one I’d absolutely recommend to anyone familiar with his previous books.

[Trin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siken's new collection is about his recovery from his stroke and the deaths of his parents. His post-stroke style involves these incredible sort of prose-poems -- solid but playful paragraphs that often wallop you with a killer last line. His language and the rhythm of his language are beautiful, and there's so much to chew on here -- this man has experienced The Horrors. I'm glad he survived to tell us about them.

Not the high-octane romanticism of Crush, but a more mature and reflective work. I will definitely be revisiting these.

[Noor · Rating 5 out of 5]

"we are deer, we are headlights. we are the road where they collide."

"it frightens me, this availability to the world, the vulnerability it takes for possible joy."

mr. siken you speak to a side of my soul i rarely aknowledge. i'll be trying to leave room for the music from now on.

[Hallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a rawness to Siken’s poetry that just cannot be duplicated.

If you’re ever wondering what love is, here’s your answer:

“A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that.”

[Emily K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to read poetry books through in one sitting but this simply made me feel too much and I had to stop several times.

[Gerhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We have to practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide."

Knowing the backstory to Siken's stroke makes this exhausting, and heartbreaking, to read, as the reader is in the crosshairs of empathy and critical analysis. I did not enjoy this at all. Flashes of sublimity are subsumed by mundanity. For me, the most extraordinary poems are 'Sentence' and 'Paragraph', towards the end. Here Siken contends directly with his loss of language, and how this makes word-building even more mysterious , powerful, and urgent in a world where language and meaning itself are under threat by technology (AI) and right-wing rhetoric replacing civic discourse globally. So, in a sense, Siken is us. We all 'know' some things about speaking truth to power, but voices of reason are being silenced globally.

[sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck !

[Shruthi]

how can i possibly be expected to wait until 2025?

[Jessie ツ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siken, you beautiful bastard you 😭😭😭.

Full RTC when I find the will to pick myself off the floor!

[tsvrky]

“The beginning of a story—it isn’t the beginning, there’s always something that comes before. The first word in the Book of Genesis, in Hebrew, starts with B. It’s cautionary. It’s primordial. You have to be careful, things want to happen. Everything is leading up to something all the time.”

and

“When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It floods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you’ve made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away. The smoke billows. There is no house, there is no new house, there is no room, the smoke is too thick to see, it is not moving away.”

and

“I wrote you a letter in case I died but I threw it away. It was good practice. We have to practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.”

[Sister Camel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will write a review some time, but right now I need to stare at the wall and be sad.

[Nott · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

[Guoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was moved by Siken's experiences, but not by his prose. It pains me to say so as I am a huge fan of his previous work. And, hey, if he decides to publish another collection in ten years, I will still be there to read it, but this one just didn't do it for me.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

it’s like getting more lore on your video game character
he writes divine
found this book by accident in Berlin because I didn’t even know he has new stuff coming out

[Gregory Duke]

I sympathize with the confessional struggles with mortality and his horrific stroke... but this sucks. Apoetic prose poetry. What happened to aesthetics? Dreadfully boring.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

very different from his claim to fame but that's to be expected. this collection is so intimate and personal and also so skillfully written. i was on that shit faster than a new album drop (i was actually over a day late)

“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.”

[g · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!! always, always Siken ♥️

[Novi · Rating 5 out of 5]

still figuring out how to read poetry and books while in medical school. read on the bus to school while fighting car sickness and in between my 2 exams today.

honestly, incredible timing that i read this collection because i have been struggling with accepting how my mental endurance and brain has changed after my concussion earlier this year especially as medical school has been kind of pushing those boundaries. the ripping headaches have returned unfortunately and i hope they go away soon.

siken writes this collection after suffering a stroke, contending with the changes to his body and his mind. several poems describe intimately how it feels to undergo brain injury: the exhaustion of doing even the simplest tasks, sleeping all the time, the grief and pain of not knowing what you will still remember and what you have forgotten, the desperation to return back to oneself, reconfiguring and accepting that one is a different person with a different brain. these poems feel really different than his earlier collection, Crush, but i also really love them. siken's style has changed a bit and i am not sure if that is because of the stroke or the content of this collection. each poem is a solid block of text. rectangular and even on the edges. i really liked that. it reminded me of when i was recovering i just wanted something solid and firm to hold onto. i wanted everything to be easy to understand. i wanted the certainty that i would still be myself or at least know myself. several of the poems focused on this insistence of deeply understanding yourself even when you appear that you don't because your brain cells screaming in pain. i like how this insistence is also in the title "I Do Know Some Things".

easily this makes it into my top fav poetry collections. i actually am going to reread this collection right now even though i just finished it.

poems that stuck out to me:
- Bed
- Yardstick
- The List
- Superposition
- Mind Control
- Wheelchair
- Heat Map
- Pain Scale

[Martina Litty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preordered and my copy arrived early. Tremendous read. Richard Siken continues to astound.

[K Rejsek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siken is back with another ten years of skill and deep emotion pulsating throughout the seven sections. Prose block form written in mainly parataxis is the perfect container for what is often funny, often heartbreaking, storytelling about family, and experiencing/recovering from a stroke. Fragmented thoughts give insight into how a mind moves, how it’s not so different from the abstract quality of poetry. The lyric moments sprinkled throughout are things of wonder and slight concern. A friendship is cultivated between reader and speaker.

“I would have taken Zeno to the bottom of the world. I imagine us standing, upside down, on the spot where all the time zones meet, and it is always now, and every step is north.”

[amihihi :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Siken, my timeless sheyla.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an interview with Poets.org, Richard Siken says, “The line break is one of the most fundamental poetic devices there is. When you break a line, you make a friction between the line and the sentence. The line goes one way, the sentence goes another. The line break produces simultaneous meanings. You get a chord of meanings instead of a single note. After my stroke, I lost my sense of line.”

As a result, the poems in his third collection, I Do Know Some Things, are a single paragraph each. It marks a big change from his previous work; for me, when I think of Siken, the lines breaks are one of the first things to come to mind. I can picture them on the pages of Crush:

These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

From Scheherazade, or:

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
With the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

From Boot Theory.

But such a big change is understandable, since now marks a big change from then, as well. Siken had a stroke, and had to learn how to walk again, and how to speak, and surely how to write poetry again. I Do Know Some Things is about this journey, as well as his childhood and his relationship with his parents, and their deaths, and his own mortality, and love, and grief, and these themes are certainly not so far from what we would expect from his work.

There’s an intimacy here that feels deeper and more personal than his previous collections, poignant and heartbreaking and occasionally funny (I don’t think my mother wanted to be a cult leader. I’m not sure they wanted her either, but the guru was ready to retire and my mother had charisma and a living room large enough to accommodate everyone, he begins one poem).

Perhaps in part because he had to rediscover language after his stroke (he wrote one of the poems of a time when he couldn’t recall the word ‘waitress’ and came up with ‘restaurant nurse’), there are so many moments in this collection that feel like discovery in themselves:

Where does hope come from? What is a ghost? To have a shadow, there has to be something to block the light. To have a conversation, there has to be someone else in the room with you. If there’s no one else in the room with you, call it thinking and do it quietly. A flame casts no shadow. A ghost never touches the ground. If you do it wrong, the psychiatrist checks the box on the form that reads Talking to someone not visible to staff. Insanity is a culture of one. Ask the projectionist what blocks the light.

From Non-Diegetic Music. Or:

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.

From Real Estate.

I Do Know Some Things is a fairly long collection, and there are probably a few too many poems, although none in particular spring to mind when I consider what could have been cut. Given that, for a long time, it seemed like the more likely scenario was no more poems by this incredible poet at all, I would prefer this option.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best collection of poetry I’ve read in a long time, and possibly better than Crush, but I think only because it feels timely. To my memory, they read completely differently than his earlier work, and I wonder if this is because he had to relearn how to speak. It makes you wonder, which is the highest compliment of any work. Themes of body snatching and possession come up as some of the most curious things, but aren’t the center of the work.

I work in a stroke ward and read this on my moments off on the curb outside the hospital. He is not what staff would call a “nice patient” but reading the book produced greater empathy in me for challenging patients - we can never really know their stories. His poems on aphasia were especially striking to me. There are at least ten, and they challenge understanding of the spoken language and what it can do.

Truly phenomenal poems, and their Lydia Davis-esque quality makes them readable and humorous enough even for non-poetry readers. They are dark, but there is still great joy in reading them. May be my book of the year.

[shar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Might be Richard Siken's very best work. Written after a stroke, Siken's newest collection wrestles what it means to be gay and disabled - how do you recover/piece together a sense of self that was already forfeited by the world? A poet by profession, Siken has to now reckon with the insufficiency of language not just in representational terms, but also corporeal ones: his mind no longer processes the relations between things in a conventional and immediate way. New ways of comprehension can confer some degree of clarity but it is mostly anguish, to realise that what is in sight is also out of reach, to relearn, all over again, that the narrative of wounded subjectivity inheres in the symbolic. For instance, declaring a simple/literal familial relation, recovering one's sense of self - he is a son of someone - is made difficult when the persona remembers that his father drove off and never came back after a coming-out gone wrong. He is a son of someone, but he wanted his best friend's stepfather instead and that made him the wrong kind of son. Attachment is the root of all suffering, the persona says at one point, realising that the relations that make up his identity are the very same attachments that deny it. But that is all that it is, made up. Somewhere between all the myths and lies a version of him which is true.

— "What did I want? My best friend's stepfather. I wanted him, or to be him, or to be like him with someone like him. He was a grown man and he was kind to me. I guess that's all it took. My best friend's stepfather, a double substitution. It's cold. It's early. My best friend's stepfather is getting ready for work. Light from the kitchen spills into the carport. There is no one I can be, no role I can fill that will get me inside this house."

[dennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

above the bed, the ceiling and the stars. below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. i fell in all directions.

oh richard siken. oh! this book completely defeated my expectations, surpassed them. for the first time in my life i found myself needing to put down a poetry collection several times, to recollect myself, go back to myself, run after my mind as it spun in circles, at a loss for words as siken tries to find his own, to rebuild his language, his life, himself, from scratch.
having seen his life pass him by, in this search for a way to express it all, past, present, future, left, right, north, south, the author breaks free from the verse and places everything in paragraphs. neatly organized. understandable. a life explained in rectangles, stories told in makeshift houses. the meaning survived, and will survive in my heart for a long time. my pain scale? 10/10.

identity is self defense. i defended myself.

[jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book which definitely deserves a read. Very vulnerable and the way he writes makes everything feel like you're going through it with him or maybe even as him. It feels very close to raw thought. The form was something I struggled with but he actually addressed that within a couple of poems at the end of the collection, which did help me understand. It's very different from his other two poetry books, but so is he it seems.

What really struck me about this collection was his perspective on relying on other people at his age. His writing conveys the helplessness of not having people believe you about your own health, and there are poems which communicate a sort of otherness that is present when you become different than the way people remember you. Especially the poems about being in the medical system, returning to his father to take care of him, and interacting with his roommate's girlfriend's kid. Very introspective collection.

Some favorite quotes:

"It’s true, he was awful to his friends, but some people don’t even try. They aim low and sleep well. They get nothing. I got a wheelchair, then a cane, and I used to know some things about an earlier version of you."

"All magic is distraction, a misdirection. The performative self: it flutters in the wind. I would like it if, for just a couple days, everyone would pretend that they still love me."

"I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

"He wants to be a movie star, to be gigantic and perfectly lit, and I am no stranger to suffering. The wide smile, the low-down glow. The way he’s looking at me now will make him famous."