I Do Know Some Things

by Richard Siken

The long-anticipated third collection from the revered Richard Siken delivers his most personal and introspective collection yet.

Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured 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 a body forgetting itself—"the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move...". 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." Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. "Part insight, part anecdote," he 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."

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

128 pages, Hardcover

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]

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]

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.

[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.

[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!

[sophie]

fuck !

[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.

[Noor · Rating 5 out of 5]

you can't understand how excited i am for this book

[g · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!! always, always Siken ♥️

[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.”

[K Rejsek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siken is back with another ten years of skill and deep emotion present and pulsing 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 and 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.”

[Martina Litty · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Mariah · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 16 I wanted a Hand Of Judgement or Hand of Mercy tattoo because of a Richard Siken poem. Now I’m 29 wanting a Hand of Judgement or Hand of Mercy tattoo because of a NEW Richard Siken poem.

Devoured this just as I did the other ones. I am so grateful that this book exists, and that Richard Siken exists.

[Madeleine Moreland · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved part 7. it took me a while to get through this book--it was too much to take in at once. i do now know that RS does indeed know some things.
"a necklace breaks and opals scatter like rats" really hits for some reason. weirdly one of my favorite lines.

[Dylan Harbison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this changes everything. Worth the wait x1000000.

"We rise into language for only so long before we fall back down into silence" !!!

[Ryan Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siken’s “Crush” is the smoldering heat of desire; “War of the Foxes” is the moral questioning of an artist surviving; Siken’s newest collection “I Do Know Some Things” is the aftermath of tragedy: what it is to rebuild a life, to rediscover your identity, and how that work trolls old memories to the surface.

This collection by Richard Siken is dark and heavy. The narrative of the collection seems autobiographical, following Siken’s stroke, and builds around the speaker’s disjointed memories: fits of childhood fears, lost loves, dying relatives, and where we go from here.
In “Cloud Factory”, Siken balances the deadpan “Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the world” against the nonsensical “meow meow meow,” showing us how absurdity and gravity share the same breath. He so naturally captures the tangential leaps our minds make when we think, bouncing from seemingly unrelated images and memories but it somehow, inexplicably so right.

Beyond image and tone, this collection is most notably unique in its form. Where in past collections Siken would play with form, this collection is largely prosaic: blocky in how it sits on the page. Perhaps nodding to this reshaping of identity, the speaker, in the poem “Paragraph” says they “made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts.”

More than anything else, what stands out most to me about this collection is how Siken’s speaker, despite being disowned, reliving childhood trauma, losing their identity, suffering unbelievable loss, and much much more, is still able to have fun. To my surprise, there were many times I found myself laughing out loud. Siken’s speaker wrestles with their identity and such heavy topics by examining them through the lens of singer-songwriter roommates, family therapy, cults, pornography, trafficking drugs with parents of old childhood friends, elevator signs, and dreams of being in the secret service. Siken gives us a lens of ludicrous imagery to view these heavy themes through and somehow it makes them more approachable.

One thing is clear, Siken is as unbridled and imaginative as ever and I look forward to the next poetry he decides to share.

[Róisín · Rating 5 out of 5]

i mean it’s richard siken. what more can i say? joking. this is a gorgeous, long-awaited collection of work that aims to examine or at least report on the way the self is built and rebuilt throughout life, and the people an events that contribute to it. there’s a really strong focus on the way language constructs self, and how memory constructs self, both with and without your intentions. it’s a key worry throughout both the biographical sections from the past, the ‘present’ narrative of recovery from a life-altering stroke, and the sections focusing on how narrative and writing structures function. the lack of line breaks through this forces the thoughts and poems to bring themselves to a logical culmination. there’s a real sense of a need for control of the situation when not afforded it (by other people’s memory and stories driving the identity in the past, the physical and mental barriers the stroke has presented), and the prose structure really feels like an attempt to manage that. the language as always is gorgeous, as is the pacing of these poems. the humour, too, and charmingly lucid self-awareness, even when it’s confrontational really makes this collection. a rundown of my favourites: ‘Real Estate’, ‘The List’, ‘Cover Story’, ‘Several Tremendous’, ‘Volta’, and ‘Hearsay’.

fave lines/snippets:
There is no story without a body, there is only theory.

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.

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.

I understood north but struggled with left. Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so happy to read new Siken poetry. His poetry speaks to my soul, though this one spoke to me a little less.

Like a lot of poetry about grief and aging, I struggle to feel fully connected. This one has worked the best (something about Siken's structure connects better for me), but they're just things I haven't experienced yet.

The style in this one is different from his others, more prose-based poetry, but I'm still astounded by his skill. Every time I read one of his poems or collections, I remember how powerful it can be. He made me love poetry. I think when I revisit this collection in the future, I'll find poems that will hit me just as hard as ones in his previous collections.

[kate]

SHUT UP IM SO EXCITED WHATTHEFUCK

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️

[Patti Perkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

One feels nearly voyeuristic as they look through this window into Siken’s life. This collection has been one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and it did not disappoint in the slightest

[Bailey Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Astronaut, tell me about your home planet. Astronaut, text me when you land."

Another amazing collection.

Some of my favorites include: Pornography, Sidewalk, Guesthouse, Ventriloquist, Tablecloth, Balcony, and History.

Excited to try my hand at writing some of my own prose poems. Siken remains a great inspiration for me. I couldn't recommend this collection more.

[maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

RICHARDDDDDD!!!!!!! god i love his writing so much. i can’t even describe it. it guts you but also leaves you bare, like you lost a layer of skin and you’re feeling the world a bit sharper. UGH! so happy i got my hands on this as quick as i could.

[Beth Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely devastating in true Richard Siken fashion

[Carla]

“The beginning of a story is a dangerous place,” Siken writes— and in this book of prose poems, every beginning is loaded. It’s a true emotional roller-coaster, and once you start, it’s impossible to stop reading. And like Beckett, Siken knows how to nail the endings.

[Leigh Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

GUESTHOUSE

James wouldn't let me move back into the condo because there were too many stairs, so he moved me into a one-room studio while we figured out what to do with me. It had brick walls and concrete floors. There was a sink and a small fridge. It used to be a one-car garage. The owner had added a bathroom in the back. It was one step up from the main room. Everyone was worried but I had practiced doing steps in rehab. I could do four of them without getting muscle cramps. The first night it was hard. I slept on the floor so I didn't fall out of the bed. I left the bathroom light on. The second night wasn't any easier. Or the third night. A series of friends were commissioned to make sure I ate. Someone came by every evening and took me to a restaurant. The rest of the time I was on my own. The single step to the bathroom wasn't a problem but getting in and out of the bed was tricky and the bed didn't have rails. It made me uneasy. The plan: Get on with it. During the day I slept or did my exercises or practiced using my walker. Even when my leg gave out I could keep myself from falling, which was nice. I couldn't get my walker in the shower, so I sat on the tile floor to soap up and rinse. It was hard to stand up so I would crawl out and lay on a towel until I was dry enough to pull myself up to the toilet without slipping. In the evenings I would go out to dinner with someone and I would have to ask uncomfortable questions: Where did we meet? How do you spell your name? Do you like me? And then there were the questions I couldn't ask: Did we love each other? Did I do bad things? Should I be ashamed? I cautiously circled the blank, struck-out spaces. I forgot most of what they told me once I got back to the guesthouse. It wasn't a real house. I didn't have a real body. I feel like there's more to say about it but there's not.

[Michael Duane Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story told of endurance: the author’s frustrations simply to communicate after his stroke, and nobody is listening; the insensitivity of some care workers downplaying his condition. He struggles to communicate while his body is uncooperative, the disconnection he feels with his own body, often in disturbing imagery. These poems are not in traditional rhyme. They come in the form of a stream of consciousness, very long paragraphs detailing every frustration and struggle against the limitations the stroke had imposed on his body and mind. I also like that this little volume was published by a homegrown company, Copper Canyon Press.

[Emma S · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.5/10 ⭐️

“We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.”

I’m a little disappointed. I love Siken’s other collections but this one fell flat for me. Maybe the content was just less relatable, but I didn’t love the formatting of the poetry either. The writing itself was pretty but lacked the depth that I’m used to associating with Siken. I may have read it too quickly. I think after a reread my rating may change but honestly? I was bored reading it and almost DNFed.

“She was just trying to get back home and what do you do with that?”