Told through unflinching prose poetry, I Do Know Some Things navigates the fractured landmarks of family trauma and personal history.
Richard Siken’s long anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the fractured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with the fear of a body forgetting itself—“the mind that / didn’t work, the leg that wouldn’t move…”—and the fear of waiting to see what a body can and cannot relearn. Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won’t connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: “dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged.” To say “black tree” when one means “night.” “Part insight, part anecdote,” Siken is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in “The field [that] had been swept clean of habit.”
*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.
