I Do Know Some Things

by Richard Siken

'A spectacular comeback' Jeremy Noel Tod, Prospect
'Siken’s signature intensity still throbs between sentences' The Yale Review

A collection of pitch-perfect prose poems written in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic stroke. From the author of cult poetry bestseller, Crush.
Richard Siken’s Crush was an underground international sensation. Twenty years on, he returns with the momentous I Do Know Some Things, cinematic in its tragic vision and emotive force.

In the aftermath of a stroke, the poet’s language and much of his memory is, for a time, wiped out. As his mind gropes its way back from oblivion, the scenery flickers between memories of a ruptured childhood and queer coming-of-age, and the precipice of the present. Each poem is a room in a ‘house owned by ghosts'.

In these seventy-seven prose poems, Siken has forged a new voice at once terrifying and vital. Brave in content and in method, I Do Know Some Things demands his recognition as an essential poet of our times.

‘Thrums with of the self, of the prose poem, of the false divide between the everyday and the surreal’ Andrew McMillan

Praise for

'Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power' Louise Glück

‘The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated’ Ocean Vuong

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

101 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

[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.

[Affan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[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.

[Noor Al Houda · 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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.”

[sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck !

[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.

[anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m devastated. good collection though

[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!

[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.

[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.”

[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.

[Nott · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

[Ana Laura Iñiguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

It pains me to give him any less than 5 stars. It is what it is. It’s definitely my least favorite thing he has published, but without comparing it to his previous body of work it still speaks to me. What’s so alluring about Siken is the way he thinks and approaches emotion and not only the way he writes about it. His essence is still there even if his ability with complex language is not the same anymore. I can’t imagine how difficult this has been for him, after the stroke. Even I feel like I’m grieving what he lost.

[Katie]

Conceptually, reminded me of Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (Siken recounts his stroke and the long path to recovering his body, memories, language). But this one, maybe due to being poetry, was a way more successful exploration for me personally.

[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

[aylin · Rating 5 out of 5]

any tongue that rises up against richard siken shall fall. you do not know the agonizing truth and resilience of this man

[Lauren M · 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.

[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.”

[ash · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've never read any Siken before -- aside from seeing that 'You're in a car with a beautiful boy' line that was so inescapable on Tumblr in Ye Olden Days that I actually blocked all appearances of 'Siken' lmao -- and I probably won't be reading any after this one. Like another reviewer said, I was moved by Siken's experiences, but not by his language or construction -- though of course managing to find any language again after a stroke attempts to steal it from you is incredible, let alone getting back to poetics -- and ultimately by the end I was, unfortunately, mostly bored.

[g · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!! always, always Siken ♥️

[amihihi :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Siken, my timeless sheyla.

[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

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

When @sikenpoems – a bot tweeting hourly excerpts from Richard Siken’s poetry on X – was taken down three years ago, the real poet stepped in, answering questions from a rapt audience of thousands and announcing his new collection, which he described as “prose poems about what I can remember about my life. It is autobiographical. A backstage pass.” Very few are likely to have taken note of the revelatory kernel of t(his) statement, for his debut collection, 2004’s Yale Younger Poets Award-winning Crush, had established an image of him as a confessional poet, writing about a life and desire he must have necessarily experienced. A truth-telling collection – one that “does not fabricate or lie” – would only continue what he had tried to break off from in the lesser-known mastery of 2015’s ‘painterly’War of the Foxes.

A few days after the announcement, he published a new poem titled “Cover Story”. It was, as promised, stripped of his characteristic lyricism and line breaks. It began thus:

My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography. He died on Christmas Day, 1990, when his family disconnected the mechanical breathing machine.

As elsewhere, context sets the stage.

In 2019, Siken had experienced a major stroke – a personal break from continuity. He was paralyzed on his right side, lost his short-term memory and object permanence; he couldn’t make sentences. And so, the poet who wrote “Cover Story” and others that would eventually become I Do Know Some Things was not quite the same Richard Siken of the previous collections. “When I had my stroke,” he said in an interview, “I lost my sense of line. I lost my music. A line break makes a hitch in the breath, a small crack in the meaning. I was trying to piece things back together and the line break was making it harder, not easier. I had to abandon it.” Instead, “The goal was to say a complete thought. That’s what I was going to measure my recovery against: a solid, complete paragraph.”

The 77 poems in this third collection present a first-person account of Siken’s experience of the stroke, his inability to remember his language or his self, and his slow arc towards recovery – clawing a selfhood back from oblivion, building “an encyclopaedia of myself”. They are solid, complete paragraphs, flitting between memories of family and early childhood, queer coming-of-age, and the awkward precipices to a scattered present. Most get their titles from words or phrases the poet struggled to remember, and many are propelled by explorations of the conceptual terms he used to rebuild himself in the absence of an ability to lie, to filter, to wield metaphors, to throw his voice. My favourite example comes from a trilogy on the units of writing – “Line”, “Sentence”, “Paragraph” – placed midway through the book:

PARAGRAPH

I didn't know what to do with it so I put it in a box. I tried to keep it all together but it was multiplicitous, in theory and practice. It was confusing. I tried to say it completely, a single thought completely. I said it as plain as I could. I got everyone into the same room to see if something would happen. Something happened. The shape of things. Their allotted slots. I set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides. I made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts. So much thinking in the space between the thoughts. I built a house out of other houses. I stapled them together. It was makeshift but it kept the wind out. I sat in each room until I could describe it. I adjusted the furniture. A paragraph is like a small town. You have to have stamina. It takes a lot to achieve escape velocity. I drove all night to get to Santa Fe once, just to get away from everything. I stayed in a Motel 6. It was like a paragraph. Once, I described a forest as a box of leaves. You can put words around anything, even an absence. Here is a pear, a pomegranate; I think these are apricots. This shoe, that coat—if you can't find the word, you can still describe it. Once, I said restaurant nurse instead of waitress. It was good enough. The meaning survived.

Siken was the first to admit that the musicality of these new poems is not as it used to be. But even with the much-derided form of prose poetry, he here shows a remarkable suppleness and sense of control (all while he writes about what it was like to lose it): the use of associative leaps mimics the “broken logic” of his condition; the dash and fragment of Crush are replaced by connections made through colons, semicolons, varied sentences and much, much more intentional punctuation. Though each piece is visually the same, they all sound and feel different from each other and their predecessors – more mature in some ways, more humorous, and indicative of the relationship between scarcity, lack, creativity and invention.

I, like many other readers, can’t quite say whether I Do Know Some Things is better than what came before it. The poet, too, mourns his former self and wants it to return, but what he has constructed in its absence is worth at least just as much admiration.

My favourite poems: “Sentence", “Pornography”, “Flevato”.