I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

A brave book, both in content and method. It takes courage to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It takes even more to reconfigure a life in the aftermath of a stroke — and to do so without ornament, without the safety net of form, with nothing left to hide behind.

That is exactly what Richard Siken does here. These seventy-seven prose poems are direct, unsettling, and autobiographical by necessity. Each image lands like a Jasper Johns target — precise, deliberate, impossible to look away from. Each poem is like a small room in a house. A room where, as the original description so perfectly puts it, you will be punched in the throat.

This is Siken clawing himself back into a self, back into a body. Writing through grief, through loss, through questions of family and identity and what it means to still be here. The result is a collection that invites a difficult intimacy — and rewards it with something rare and true.

Fans of Siken’s celebrated debut Crush will find something both familiar and startlingly new here. This is not a poet performing. This is a poet surviving — and somehow, beautifully, making art out of that survival.

If you’ve been looking for poetry that feels genuinely alive — the kind that stays with you long after you’ve closed the cover and stepped back out into the sea air — this is the one to pull off the shelf.

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